Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book is superb. I have read every SOA book available (up until Apr/06) because it's part of my job as a technology research analyst and all-around techno-geek. From those that I have read and studied, this is the only one I feel compelled to write a review about. AND - because I did have to go through it in such detail I'm going to raid my research notes and share with you a detailed review of not just the book, but each of its chapters.
Chapter 1 - Introduction
Nothing special here, this is just a chapter that introduces the rest of the book. Call it a glorified table of contents if you will. At first I felt like skipping it altogether, but then I did what I'm supposed to do for my job and that is read each and every part. In the end, I'm glad I took the time for two reasons: By reading a summary of each of the chapters I got a good feel for what this book was going to cover and what it wasn't going to cover. Secondly, I liked the author's intro stuff about ideal and not so ideal (real) SOA. Kind of insightful and stinging at the same time. Still, though, this is still just a description of other chapters. It's also a chapter you can get for free at the book's web site.
Chapter 2 - Case Studies
Here the author provides background information for the two companies he uses as case studies. If you're into case studies, then you'll definitely want to read through this. But - I found the subsequent samples pretty easy to follow and I think you could get away with skipping this chapter if you really wanted to.
Chapter 3 - Introducing SOA
Here's where I started getting into the meat of the book. If you think you don't understand what soa is or what the industry's made of it or turned it into then you need to read this chapter. It breaks it all down and builds it all up again in a very systematic manner. Make sure you leave this chapter with an understanding of how primitive and contemporary variations of soa are different because the author uses these terms later.
Chapter4 - The Evolution of SOA
Finally someone who makes a distinction between specification and standard and gets it right. This chapter talks about the soa industry and how vendors are responsible for soa but are also causing problems at the same time. How standards organizations are working for soa but also competing at the same time. Pretty interesting stuff and even though this was the least technical chapter, not once was I bored. It ends by comparing Ssoa with older architectures. I especially like how the author differentiates between soa and "traditional" distributed architecture that uses web services. (hint: rpc has a lot to do with it)
Chapter 5 - Web services and primitive soa
I read the author's first soa book last year and this chapter seemed to repeat a few sections from that. But if I remember correctly it goes into more detail and provides case study examples that the first book didn't have. If you're a web services veteran you can probably skip this one.
Chapter 6 -Web Services and Contemporary SOA (Part I: Activity Management and Composition)
Here he goes up a gear and dives right into that scary thing we've been calling ws-* Everything from transactions to context mgmt to orchestration and so on is covered. I really felt the author did a brilliant job building this chapter up by starting with simple meps and building up to activity management and bpel and so on. He really showed how each adds a layer over the other and how all add layers to soa.
Chapter 7 - Web Services and Contemporary SOA (Part II: Advanced Messaging, Metadata, and Security)
Yup, the rollercoast ride continues here as he gets into addressing, reliable messaging, security and other ws-* specs. All of these are specs I had already heard about and I think this type of coverage is appropriate forwhere soa is going. I forgot to mention that in this chapter and 6 he introduces 'in plain english' sections that are hilarious. They are humorous analogies that compare these complex technologies to analogies he writes about a car wash. Good, fresh writing in the usual dull and dry techno world.
Chapter 8 - Principles of Service-Orientation
Essentially a whole bunch of theory about designing services and then eight specific 'principles' (dos and don'ts) about how to design services the right way for soa. I had to go back and reread this chapter after I finished the book. I sort of glanced thru it at first but then found out that later chapters really use these principles. When I went through it again I actually thought this was pretty important stuff. This really is the next oo. You can get this chapter for free at the book web site too.
Chapter 9 - Service Layers
STudy this if you're a application architect or enterprise architect. It shows what you canh do with services built with service-orientation. The diagrams showing different types of layers combined together are pretty cool.
Chapter 10 - SOA Delivery Strategies
If you're a PM you'll love this chapter. It gets into the different phases in a soa project and how you can reorganize them using 'delivery strategies' depending on your budgets and priorities. I'd pay extra close attention to the pros and cons parts where, after documenting these strategies in abstract, the author points out their true colors.
Chapter 11 + 12 - Service-Oriented Analysis I + II
Don't know where to start when it comes to figuring out your services? Well, the author lays it all out here. He provides a process for systemtically breaking down your business logic and divying it up into services. Chapter 12 is like an instruction manual about service model. Being froma web services background this was all new to me.
Chapter 13 - 16 - Service-Oriented Design I, II, III, IV
Roll up your sleeves man, because here is where you get into the real muck of building web services for an soa. There are a bunch of processes that hash out the nitty gritty of wsdl, xsd, and bpel and show you how to build services for the types of layers set up in ch.9. Tons of code and case study samples and tips for design. This is probably the most valuable part of the book for developers and architects.
Chapter 17- Fundamental WS-* Extensions
I forgot tomention that in chapters 6 and 7 no code samples are given. He only covered ws-* specs conceptually. All of the corresponding code is placed in this chapter. A bit inconvenient if you're a developer who wants to see the code while learning about the spec, but not tragic. The neat thing is he ties the code samples into the case studies. This was my first experience with ws-* in real world tyhpe scenarios.
Chapte r18 - SOA Platforms
The author documents j2ee and .net frameworks here first in total abstract and then about how they support the different parts of soa. This was very interesting because it related a lot of the concepts stuff to actual technology and the let you compare different technologies in how they support soa.
I recommend this book to colleagures and clients and I'm recommending it here. If you have questions about SOA then this book probably has the answers you're looking for. I say that because by the time I finished reading it I ran out of questions myself.
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