I was looking forward to receiving this book for my first review, I mean, wow… free book! Imagine my disappointment when a surprisingly slim package falls through my letterbox. The book is a mere 480 pages long, that’s very little for US compared to some of Wrox’s other offerings. After a brief look at the book it was soon clear that a large portion of this book is available online in the form of 7 appendices.

It is worth mentioning that although Wrox’s parent company has gone out of business seemingly Apress has bought this title. Wiley Publishing, now the owner of wrox.com has pledged to keep the online resources for all of the original Wrox titles online regardless of whether they bought the titles themselves or not, so all the online appendices and code examples are still available at wrox.com for the foreseeable future.

Eagerly I started reading my way through Chapter 1 of this book, having done so, I promptly did again. The start of this book has more acronyms than an entire season of Star Trek and unfortunately the definitions for these acronyms are either far too brief or in a few cases non-existent. I would have liked a simple table summary at the end just to re-cap these.Unfortunately, my experience did not improve with Chapter 2. It soon becomes clear that perhaps instead of 7 online appendices, the book would have benefited from one or two extra printed chapters. Chapter 2 tries to cover XML Basics, all the XML Schema needed for the book and HTTP in just 48 pages. Whilst the XML basics was definitely enough to get started, XML Schema was sped through in just 3 pages. I don’t believe anyone could learn XML Schema in so brief a introduction, I certainly didn’t. I think this book would have benefited by adding an entire chapter on XML Schema and expanding the HTTP section a bit more.

Despite the very bad start to this book, by the middle of Chapter 3, it becomes clear that indeed the authors do know what they are talking about, with the introduction to XML-RPC being very thorough and concise you are quickly thought not too soon thrown into the deep end developing an XML-RPC client for O’Reillys Meerkat news service. I can safely say that by the time I done with this chapter I was convinced that Web Services are God’s gifts to programmers... well maybe I wouldn’t go that far. My only complaint at this point where that the examples were not printed in the book, and whilst this isn’t usually a problem, as with all Wrox books, there is no CD, you must download all examples and such from the website. Whilst this book is small enough to carry around for travel reading, be prepared to need your laptop with WiFi capabilities. There is only one chapter dedicated to XML-RPC, the reason for this being as is said in the book that the focus for the book is SOAP based Web Services.

The book really came into its own with its SOAP based chapters, with a basic introduction to SOAP quickly followed by a look deeper in to the technology. Whereas the first chapters suffered from being to brief, you really start to get a feeling that the authors actually know what they are talking about... finally. This book really does start from the basics, for someone with no knowledge of SOAP or namespaces, the first chapter on SOAP will bring you right up to speed. Be warned, if you are not a Star Trek fan, most examples in this chapter are Star Trek episode based.

The book just continues to excel with the remainder of its chapters, with chapters on WSDL, UDDI and application integration its covers most everything you will need. There is also a chapter devoted to security and another which covers the best practices when creating Web Services. All in all, this book whilst weak to start is a great read and I will certainly recommend that you buy the revision which I’m told will address all of the issue brought to light by this review.

Reviewed by: Davey Shafik