[Review] Service-Oriented Architecture - A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services

I bought this book a little over a month ago. I was hoping to learn more about SOA and web services in preparation for working in my new department. This book has 5 star review overall on Amazon, so I thought was getting exactly what I needed... Unfortunately, things could not be further from the truth.

The problem with this book is that it's too high level. Many of the scenarios described in the book are described in such high level that in many cases, I am at a loss as to what are the differences and points that the author is trying to get across. In those examples, ultimately it all boils down to stripping away the communication layer of an application and slap on a web services integration layer which appears to do just about the same thing. Magically, your applications will be able to talk to each other with ease, but there is no clear explanation as to why a web services approach would do better than other traditional approaches. Sure, pros and cons are given, but they are simply statements made without enough detail to support them.

I also found the flow of the book hard to follow and erratic. Often it feels like points are made simply for the sake of making it, there is no logical continuation from the previous point. There are a lot of back references too, i.e. in chapter 10+ you would still get a lot of: "for more information on XYZ, please refer to chapter 5". But of course it is rather pointless to refer back to chapter 5, since it is just more of the hand-wavy high level overview of the particular concept.

Another thing that bugs me are the diagrams in the book. Too many times I have found a diagram referred to in a paragraph would be found a couples pages ahead resulting in a lot a page flipping. *Good* thing the diagrams are about as useful as drawing stick figures in an anatomy class and soon I have learned to ignore them.

One might argue that the book is aimed at system architects and I am the wrong target audience. That is probably true but I have my doubts about the usefulness of this book for system architects as well. I would argue that any IT professional with experience architecting systems and background in software engineering would already be familiar with the strategies and best practices outlined in the book. Even to me some of the strategies and best practices sounds just like back in first year economics when the prof says that higher demand will result in increased supply.

My rating: 2/5