Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Web Services with SOAP:

This title is a decent introduction. It covers the important technologies (SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI) behind web services. For me, it contains too much Perl code. I prefer "WebServices essentials" instead.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Web Services with SOAP:

I have read the book in full, although I skimmed the chapters on UDDI and on security.

I was disappointed at the amount of material that it contained (it was thinner than I expected), and had hoped that it would also act as a reference to the better-known SOAP APIs, particularly Apache SOAP 2.2, ie properties and methods (much as David Flanagan's excellent "Java in a Nutshell" also includes a quick reference to the essential Java packages) - this would have made an informative book into a very useful book. Perhaps this could be considered for a second edition?

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Web Services with SOAP:

I'm not satisfied with quite many of the examples as well. Here's a wsdl document and what the activestate wsdl validator (Perl based - on of the authors is a Perl SOAP::Lite maintainer) says about it:

http://www.ulf-wendel.de/tmp/Owner.wsdl

http://wsdl.activestate.com:8080/validator/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ulf-wendel.de%2Ftmp%2FOwner.wsdl

It took me roughly one hour to correct it:

http://www.ulf-wendel.de/tmp/Owner_new.wsdl

http://wsdl.activestate.com:8080/validator/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ulf-wendel.de%2Ftmp%2FOwner_new.wsdl

One must be wrong: the book or the validator. As one can spot some more bugs within the examples I tend to belive the book is wrong and needs some corrections. 35 USD is a lot for just 160 pages of content, you should come up with an errata as soon as possible or even better stop this edition and provide a new one.

This is the very first O'Reilly book I've to rate with less than four of five stars :(.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Web Services with SOAP:

The first 2 chapters of this book are an overview of the problem web services. They are okay. But when I started to work with the examples of chapters 3 and 4 I got very angry. No example worked out of the box. The authors don't tell a beginner which steps are needed to get the examples running. I've spent a lot of time to get them running. But I'm very frustrated. E. g. the installation of SOAP::Lite is a real frustrating adventure. It is not mentioned that you have to install IO-Stringy, MailTools, MIME-Lite, MIME-Tools. You have to find out yourself where you can get those packages. When I tried to install jabber I got version conflicts etc. Actually I've have problems with the publisher example, because with this example I can't login. The result of my login trial is: "Caught Exception: SOAPException = SOAP-ENV:Client, No Deserializer found to deserialize a 'http://www.soaplite.com/authInfo:authInfo' using encoding style 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'."

My opinion about a good book is, that there should be a lot of examples that explain the basis of a problem. Those examples should work out of the box. Then I've the possibilty to reach the aim of understanding the hype web services. With the introduced examples I'm not able to.

I hope the authors will do better with the next publishing of this book.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Web Services with SOAP:

A good overview of SOAP with some very practical examples. Very exciting reading.

Still, a few mistakes in the examples makes them hard to try out.

The appendix C (code listings) is a waste of space.

I would have prefer an appendix on how to install a typical web service.

The book covers mostly rpc binding and not much document binding.

Not a lot about SOAP over e-mail, SOAP attachments or ebXML, ...

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Web Services with SOAP:

While I have not finished the book yet, it is a very good starting point for understanding SOAP. It is unbiased and does a decent job of identifying differences and interoperability problems between popular languages and implementations. It is much better than other books I have seen on SOAP, most seem to just cut and paste the majority of the w3c spec document and provide rehashed content from SOAP related web sites. I would say it lives up to the quality and completeness I expect from an O'Reilly publication.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Web Services with SOAP:

The book is a good starter explaining SOAP, but I have yet to get the first Java example in the book to run. I understand that there a dozens of versions software out there you have to get and configure, but the author leaves it up to you to figure out 99% of it. Thus this gets really frustrating and really old fast. Hopefully a version two will take care of this.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Web Services with SOAP:

Very good technical overview of SOAP and web services in general, including a summary of XML Schema. Recommended reading.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Web Services with SOAP:

I think the errors in some of the perl listings will cause a great deal of fustration to those new to SOAP. Also the examples using jabber all failed with .. Can't locate object method "AddDelegate" via package "Net::Jabber::Protocol" this occurred both with my home spun experiments and some of the examples from the examples zip file. I have scoured the internet and news groups for anyone else who may have encountered and fixed this problem.. as yet no one else has encountered this. I,m hoping to find a solution some how. At the moment I am about 1/3 of a way through the book.

Stephen