Book Review - .NET Web Services: Architecture and Implementation with .NET

So over the holidays I had a chance to read .NET Web Services: Architecture and Implementation with .NET. For someone still relatively new to web services, this was a great book. It brought me up to speed on life, the universe and everything SOAP. At one point I almost wanted to go and make a SOAP system using SNAIL mail as the transport. (You could actually do that! Why you would want to is another matter... and requires a bit of history and humour which requires more beer then I have in my house right now. Jeff will know what I am talking about)

Anyways, I liked the book. It really brought me up to speed on the topic, and I was able to write my first web service immediately after that. It was an extremely easy read, and I was done it in less than two days. However with that said, I have to point out an amazingly glaring problem with the book.

It needs an entirely NEW book for the errata for all the bloody botched code samples! Quite frankly, I have to wonder if there was a technical review of the code at all in respect to the content it was supposed to show. Confusion abound when code samples don't actually match the screenshots, or worse yet, actual WRONG code. And the discussion about getting the errata on keithba.net is kinda useless when the domain isn't even in use anymore. A domain dying in 2 years after publishing isn't very good.

I was hoping for a lot more in the WS-Security arena. Although it is covered, I found it was quite lacking in useful samples on how we can secure our content. Can't blame the author for this though, as it really is a topic that needs its own book. I will have to find such a book on WS-Security as that is what interests me the most out of the potentials with SOAP envelopes.

All in all, still a great book. Even with the botched code samples, its easy to pick up what is being said, and what the intent is. And I finally now understand XML serialization the way it is intended. In no time I was consuming web services in Microsoft Sharepoint through ASP.NET and writing web services in Mono on Linux.

Good book, worth the read. If you know of any good books to recommend on WS-Security, could you please email me or leave a comment here? Thanks.

Happy reading!