BOOK REVIEW

Professional ASP.NET Web Services

Wrox

11 authors to list

ISBN 1861005458

 

Category

Rating

LEGEND:

5=Excellent

4=Good

3=Standard

2=Fair

1=Poor

 

Overall recommendation

4

Quality of organization

5

Easy to read and navigate

4

Sufficient quantity of examples

4

Examples are error free

4

Reuse for reference

4

Quality of index

4

 

Summary Review 

 I recommend this book because I find it easy to read.  The top down approach helped me understand the subject matter.  Introduction chapters were very helpful to get me started and the details came in later chapters. I had no issues with C# code examples.

Detailed Comments 

 This book is well organized, I liked the introduction chapters that start you at the 10,000 foot level and then the later chapters dug deep down into details.  This Top-Down approach was very useful to me to understand the material.

The first few chapters discuss the major components of Web Services to give the reader a good understanding of the architecture involved.  The major components discussed were organized in conceptual layers such as the Transport, the Data encoding (XML and XML Schema), SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.  Also some history and other technologies were compared.  Examples of Web Services were given immediately to show how easy it is to write Web Services in Note Pad and better yet in Visual Studio .NET.

Chapter 3 explained how to consume a Web Service once it is built.

 

Starting with chapter 4 the conceptual layers were explained in greater details

WSDL and all the sections involved, Wire Formats like SOAP and Custom Techniques.

Finally Web Services Discovery (UDDI) was discussed in chapter 7.  All well done.

 

More advanced subjects were discussed starting with chapter 8 like Design techniques, Asynchronous programming, State management, Transactions, Data Caching, Authentication and SOAP Security.   Exposing Data and Serialization etc..  Well done also.

 

I liked reading the case studies using BizTalk Server, Passport-Style Authentication Services, and Distributed Processing, you can find them at the end of the book.  I was more interested in the Passport-Style Authentication and Distributed Processing.  I did not have time for any examples on the case studies.

 

Over all this book is very good, and I strongly recommend it.  This book explained the material well using the right approach.  I found few errors here and there but I have not found a book that is perfect.  Most of the examples that I had time to try worked well.  This book is NOT only for intermediate and advanced users because if you are a beginner to Web Services and like to be challenged then this book is also for you.

 

Reviewer:

Gus Aawar

Date:

9/10/02