internet applications

It's hard to think of a writer that has better web service credentials that Keith Ballinger. Because of that, I expected a lot from this book. And though the book is good, it's unfortunately equivalent to almost every other .NET web service intro title. I didn't find any more low-level details or tips that weren't already in other books (other good choices are Yasser Shohoud's Real World XML Web Services for VB'ers and O'Reilly's Programming .NET Web Services for C#-coders). There was disappointingly little advice for enterprise architecture here (how web services should fit into a distributed application) although I got a better understanding of SOAP encodings. I haven't yet found any book that covers WSE... hopefully the second editions of these books will fill this area in.

First things, Keith Ballinger is extremely knowledgable when it comes to .NET web services. This book contains a lot of valuable information about designing and building web services using the .NET framework. So why only 3 stars?

This book was published in 2003 (some specs from April 2003 are mentioned to confirm that), but it reads more like a 2001-2002 book. I was really looking for some information about how and when to use WSE instead of standard ASMX. Unlike most ... books I own, this book really needed more technical editing and some better graphics (check out figure 3.3 for a chuckle). Lastly, the website for this book contains no useful information and is often unavailable. I expected more from ... Keith Ballinger.

Keith covers a wide range of topics in this book. Unfortunately, the discussion is shallow, and you will find yourself seeking additional resources for all of the topics covered in the book. If you are looking for a high level overview of the technologies involved because you are new to web services, this book is for you. But if you are looking to fully understand the architectural and implementation details for the core web services technologies, be prepared to buy some more books.