Great, Pure SOA Design Book, but bit Long!
919683
It would be nice if we all recognize that SOA is not WS*. The problem with almost any book that claims that it is about service oriented architecture - is actually about web services. The industry fails to recognize that web services are really a very small part of SOA. But the amazing issue is that almost any company vastly capitalizes on WS. In other words, companies typically do not invest in strategies. They construct WS, deploy and integrate WS infrastructure, and create a WS environments. But where is their SOA?

This modeling book gives an opportunity, a rare chance to reconsider what actually we are spending our money on. It comes down to a rudimentary selection between the bottom-up approach, where web services are launched to satisfy tactical concerns; or a most strategic, a top-down choice, that advocates reuse, encourages efficiency, and more.

Recently, the development of simpler service technologies confirms this book's assertion that a service is not only WS. Meaning, a service can be any software component that exposes interfaces to its potential consumers. REST for example, also known as Representational State Transfer, devised by Roy Fielding early in the game, enables developers to avoid the convoluted WSDL (a rigid and tight contract) and utilize a looser service contract approach. As a side note, I would volunteer: it would be astute not to bet on WSDL as a "forever technology". Developers always complain about the WSDL method because it is complex, error-prone, and time and resource consuming.

But the most compiling reason why anyone would want to read this book would be the large amount of new approaches to service design and architecture. It is a serious discussion about the "why" and later it proposes the "what". It is about the "thinking" process first, then the "doing" process next. In essence, every architect and developer that follows this book's advice becomes a strategist that can see the big picture, by learning how to avoid the silo mentality that has driven many of our decisions.

I would give it a four star because it is too long and very detail. Almost every book part can be expanded into a separate book.
2274365
The Service-Oriented Modeling: Service Analysis, Design, and Architecture book describes the service-oriented development life cycle in detail and offers excellent project management and monitoring mechanisms. This process starts at the service-oriented conceptualization phase, continues through the service-oriented discovery and analysis, and concludes with service design and architecture. These various disciplines contribute a great deal of success to achieving project milestones and goals.  This is particularly important in service oriented architecture (SOA) since often organizations are new to deploying SOA applications.

The other major benefit that is provided by this service-oriented modeling study is the recommendation to take a proactive approach when planning SOA projects. This method advocates devising an SOA development strategy that counts for unpredictable events. Indeed, this is a paradoxical approach, but these events such as recession or even future merger between organizations can immensely influence a service life cycle. Thus, rigorous planning is necessary.

This book is a must for any IT professional that is developing in a SOA environment!
2468607
'Active Directory' by Joe Richards is an awesome resource for IT Professionals who need to learn more about the ins and outs of Active Directory and how to get around to make the most of and improve their IT infrastructure.  At over 800 pages and 31 chapters, and this being a 3rd Edition, this is a tried and true reference manual that is well-written and a pleasure to follow.

BUT...

As I perused through this book and read the contents, I was amazed at how lacking the # of screenshots and images there were throughout.  While there are screenshots, for something like IT management and configuration, I would expect SO much more to be present.  Some pages there are page after page with screenshots present to drive home points, then the reader will go dozens and dozens of pages with just nothing.  Providing screenshots doesn't just make things easier to understand, it also helps make such a large book that much more readable.  This may sound like a minor point, but for such a poor layout I would have expected this to be a programming cookbook or SQL text full of stored procedures, table design, and triggers.  With other O'Reilly lines that have such outstanding design under the cover, this really takes the book down a notch or 2 from where it could have been.

**** RECOMMENDED
3725412
I agree with AC, the topics Penelope Coventry covers in this title are covered very well. I found within just a few hours that I was creating new forms and views with the DFWP, styling the output from DVWP and building some nice customised applications.

The style is not like so many other books making you do menial tasks for the sake of step-by-step. Penelope instead has created some thoughtful and interesting exercises, assuming the reader wants to be engaged and create business value as a result of investing time working through the book. A refreshing approach I must say.

I recommend the book to any aspiring SharePoint designer but, would equally recommend some grounding in WSS architecture beforehand.
2959094
This is a well-written, well-organized book that makes sense of the constantly changing world of Web services. I'd recommend this to anyone with a peripheral knowledge of the services standards and service oriented architecture. Its only fault is that it covers a large range of topics and therefore never gets the chance to go into depth in any one area. The author should supplement chapters with recommendations for additional books that continue where this book leaves off.
Other than that, I really enjoyed this book. The author's writing style is clear even when he discusses complex topics. If you're looking for a fast way to get up to speed on Web services and SOA, then this book is perfect.
3791777
Great book, useful information. Less on design/layout, though!
2954750
Not too dry to read like some other OS design books. Is for Solaris what "Inside Windows NT" and "Design and Implementation of BSD4.4" are for their respective OS's. Very eye opening as to why Solaris has no trouble scaling up to many processors, and throws in some useful, practical tricks to boot.
2093034
I like to think about this book as 3 books in one. The first 8 chapters are dedicated to explore and explain patterns, their creation process. their utility and an insight into the pattern community.

The design patterns exploration start on chapter 9 while dedicating chapter 10 exclusively to the different flavors of Model View patterns.

If the book was only that I will be very happy, but (like in a Sunday morning infomercial, there is more!)

Chapter 11 is an in depth discussion of the different modules systems in use today, with an special emphasis on AMD

It depends on your knowledge of module systems, but even if you use them you may find some nuggets of information in there. I did.

Finally, the next two chapters are dedicated to design patterns in jQuery itself and exploring some of the patterns used for jQuery plug-in design.

You may find this last two chapters redundant but I think that the inclusion in the book is very wise, specially with how ubiquitous jQuery is today.
4314215
This book provides an end-to-end solution for implementing a complete sample web time-keeping application with transaction management in the backend that is suitable for a clustered environment. This book assumes that you have working knowledge of Java and a relatively good understanding of J2EE. It also largely assumes that you have a reasonable understanding of software development processes, relational databases, and n-tier architectures. The book wastes no time delving into the specifics required to build the sample application. The author refers you to the respective websites for setup instructions and advanced features instead of duplicating this information in the book. He says he does so to not risk having it become out-of-date, but it is somewhat inconvenient for the reader to have the information split up like this.

The chapters in this book are organized so that each chapter builds on the previous one. Furthermore, because the chapters are logically segregated, you could jump into a chapter directly (for example, Chapter 6, "Overview of the Spring Framework") and learn about just that chapter's content. Also, you might want to skip a chapter if you are not interested in using that technology. For example, you might want to use NetBeans instead of Eclipse, therefore, you would skip Chapter 8 on "The Eclipse Phenomenon!".

Chapter 1, "Introduction to Agile Java Development," gives you an overview and a preview of the technologies and processes used in this book. Chapter 2, "The Sample Application: An Online Timesheet System," is primarily dedicated to defining the business requirements for the sample application; however, it also provides a nice overview of AMDD and XP methodologies. Chapter 3, "XP and AMDD-Based Architecture and Design Modeling," covers the design of the sample application. Chapter 4, "Environment Setup: JDK, Ant, and JUnit," covers the environment setup. From here, you enter the world of Java coding at a rapid pace when you look at programming with Hibernate in Chapter 5. Chapters 6 and 7 are dedicated to the Spring Framework. Chapter 7, "The Spring Web MVC Framework," and Chapter 8 are where everything converges, and you should see and appreciate why the earlier chapters were organized the way they were. You will know what happens underneath the hood and hence have a solid foundation of the technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, Ant, and JUnit. From there, the book covers some advanced concepts and wraps up with some extras in the appendices.

The earlier chapters use the command line so that you can get some fundamental understanding of how the various Java tools work. Then, when you use these tools (for example, Ant and JUnit) in an IDE such as Eclipse, you will know exactly what is going on behind the scenes. This becomes particularly important if the IDE does not meet your needs.

This book is about Java coding and there is a lot of code related to the sample application. The sample application with all the source code and related files can be downloaded from the publisher's website, which is much better than cluttering up the book with it. Also, there are many figures and screenshots in this book, which I found most helpful. All in all, I found it a pretty good book on Agile Java development, provided you have the forementioned prerequisite experience. It isn't an easy read, though, and you must take an interactive approach with it if you expect to learn anything.
4646354
'Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications' by Cal Henderson is a fantastic book for examining the important need of designing a web site that is adaptable for the future.  At my current place of employment we have had to deal with the issues/problems addressed in this book for years now, and having a guide like this would have probably only made things easier.

With any web-based company and relating product, there will eventually be a time that comes when the current architecture just no longer does the job.  When that time arrives, the process of addressing storage/memory/code problems can be very costly, or it can be dealt with at a much earlier point in time.  This book won't do the work for you but it will help point out the problems that can result sooner instead of later.

Chapter Listing

01. Intro

02. Web Application Architecture

03. Development Environments

04. Localization & Unicode

05. Data Integrity & Security

06. Email

07. Remote Services

08. Bottlenecks

09. Scaling Web Applications

10. Statistics, Monitoring, Alerting

11. APIs

Another reviewer is correct in that the gems in this books are chapters 8-10.  If you read nothing else in this text, focus on these 3 gems and you will have gotten your money's worth.  For any IT individual or engineer that is in charge or the overall design of your web application/site, read this wonderful book and improve the future of your web presence!!!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
1003905
This book is excellent source for anyone who is involved in modernizing the legacy software application with Oracle SOA Suite.  It details the comprehensive approach for any scale modernization using Oracle SOA.
2856109
I've been thoroughly impressed with this book. It throws a wide net over most of the current web services standards and technologies, and gives you at least an understanding of where they all fit, while still providing you with enough depth on the crucial ones (SOAP (with Axis), UDDI, etc.) so that you can get started with real projects.
I particularly liked the way in which the authors have created an all-in-one reference book on the most important web services technologies. For instance, I've never been able to read SOAP messages without having a reference on XML namespaces and XML schemas handy -- no more -- it's all here in this book.
The coverage of the new Apache Axis project is especially good; not only does it explain the advantages of the new architecture for handling SOAP headers, but it gives code examples for making use of these new features.  This is to be expected, since many of the authors of this book are major contributors to the Axis project.
I also found the chapters on Web Services security and UDDI to be helpful and enlightening. While all of the chapters in the book don't live up to the promise of these excellent chapters, it's still overall an great introduction to this new set of technologies.
And by the way, the guy that gave the book 1 star because it has "no source code downloadable" should have first tried going to [...] and done a search on the author's names -- the page for the book CLEARLY has a section for "downloads" where you can get the source code.
4129826
This is a really great book, which I would like to recommend to anyone working with software development related to EJB's or J2EE. Anyone who would like to learn about the concepts could also read it since it covers all levels of understanding from the overall picture to the nitty-gritty details of anything related to EJB.
What I found most helpful were the parts about best-practice solutions, which guided me a lot in my design decisions.
Even better, if you can accept reading the book on your computer screen, as a pdf file, it's free of charge.
Thanx for a great book Ed!!!
3183124
The book has a good tone.  It's as if the author is giving an informal tutorial on different problems and their possible solutions.  Although many times glossing over details I would recommend this book for any average developer.  The book at the very least gets you thinking about a lot of different topics.  The author explains some patterns & anti-patterns in sufficient detail.  Some tech errors and typos but the scope of the book is awesome and very enlightening.  As a developer this book gives me insight into the problems architects and Sr. level developers deal with.  A very good read @ 333 pages
2733891
This book is more about the identifying and satisfying the dependencies that are such stumbling blocks for new or naive practioners of OO design with UML.  Although I had attended UML courses and read other OO and UML books, applying UML and gaining benefit from doing so seemed impossible until I read this book.  This book communicates something I never found in other OO/UML books I've read.
443503
This book has outstanding breadth of information for system architecture. Some details are quite basic, while others are quite indepth. Overall though, what's most important is that the book is very well written and serves its purpose well. It has many excellent strategies, along with a comprehensive feature list of most J2EE projects.

Definately a 5 star.
1585290
I don't take the time to write a review very often but I have to give it to the Visual Blueprint Series. The book devotes an extensive chapter near the front of the book (I believe chapter 3) to cover the many aspects of programming, i.e. loops, variables, function calls, strings, and operators. It also covers scripts, HTML tags, ect. Then the remainder of the book is mostly 2 page examples of how to implement these into ASP pages. There is no fluff, it gets right to the point. Many other books touch on subjects and then move on leaving you with these "But what if..." questions. This book doesn't leave you wondering. I give it an A+