Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) For Dummies

Skims the surface in some areas and is really in bad need of updating. Amazon is perhaps the largest SOA company and would have been nice to see a breakdown of their architecture, etc.

Good reference book to learn the basics about SOA. I definitely recommend it for anyone needing to "get smart" on the topic.

Easy to read and understand and it was exactly what I needed. I will be using SOA and needed some good background which I got from this book.

I needed a book to recommend to beginners, so I had to read some. And i think this book makes it very easy for them.

Great book, explaining everything you need to know and more about SOA with the proper level of technical knowledge. 100% Recommended

The best resource for the S.O.A. professional. Cuts out all the boring jabber and gets to the point!

I've always hated the "for Dummies" series -- while I never doubted its application to me (at least in some areas), I didn't think I should display my stupidity nakedly with a long line of yellow book spines! That said, the real difficulty with the series naming convention is it doesn't allow one to level-set purchases. Are the (IT-focused) Dummies books for technical novices, learning how to program? Are they for management, trying to understand the industry's latest fashion? It's unlikely you can address both segments with a single title, and having sat in both seats I can understand the confusion.If you're looking for how to write programs that output SOAP headers, this book is emphatically not for you. This so-called "low-SOA" point of view, in which "service oriented architecture" means only "addressing services with URL's to applications running behind web servers" is well-served by plenty of other books, and in any event isn't particularly interesting. Middleware is middleware, and while there are certainly differences in quality, performance, stability, reliability and integrity of various middleware architectures from XDR to CORBA, from DCOM to SOAP, they all perform the basic functions of finding, calling, and getting results from network-addressed applications or services. Enough said.What's more interesting in a real SOA world -- what Gartner calls "high-SOA" -- is not how one builds services, but how one structures business processes given the capability to distribute infrastructure (and other) services. That's the focus of this book, and in fact the focus of the SOA Consortium [...] Assuming you can capture, precisely define, store, reuse and optimize business processes (some of which are automated, and some of which aren't), how would you structure your business to take advantage of that "modularity of process" to better build business capabilities that support your interactions with your customers and your suppliers?In clearly laid-out chapters, accessible by any reader, this book details only briefly the technical underpinnings; but in far more detail (and to my mind, more interesting detail) how SOA changes your company's structure. Sure, SOA is a fashion that has struck the IT industry, like many others -- but that doesn't mean it lacks value as an approach, a methodology to optimizing the business. Certainly the adoption of SOA by industry -- Gartner has called SOA "mainstream" since late 2008 -- comes from more than simple fashion. It comes from a proven methodology for improving the bottom line, using IT automation where appropriate. Most importantly, the clear case studies in this book of SOA success in real companies make it an invaluable reference. Nothing clarifies a complex topic more than clearly-explicated case studies, and those alone makes this book worth far more than the price.David Linthicum said it best when he said "SOA is something you do, not something you buy." That said, it's good to have a solid, well-structured introduction to hand when you're doing it -- so this book is something you buy!

I am a software developer/architect who needs to get up to speed on factoring and extending an enterprise application into a service-oriented approach, at least for some aspects. After reading this book I'm left wondering who it could possibly be for. It certainly didn't help me figure out even the first step I will need to take technically to start. It explains a lot of technological concepts related to SOAs, in fairly superficial ways (this is, after all, a Dummies book...) But it didn't really provide any concrete examples, show how any particular products work, nor provide guidelines for anyone involved on what to do.

This is the first, For Dummies, book I've read. I found this one overly verbose and terminology is used interchangeably which it really shouldn't be at this level.I do wish writers of text books would remember that we're busy professional people who don't have time to read superfluous padding, just keep the sentences short and simple and save us all days of effort. And backache, I've been lugging this heavy book backwards and forwards to work to read on the train for weeks now.There's also a little section on one of the author's insights into a hypothetical Director on the beach with "his blond". Blond what? To add insult to injury she has a petulant outburst and throws his mobile phone into the sea because he's doing his important busy stuff. It's one of the few times, the word "she" appears in the book. Every actor is a he. Did they not realise that women also read (and even write) technology books?

Like it's related 'IT Architecture' neighbour, this just struck me as pitched too deeply. Not an easy topic for a novice methinks but I'm sure it can be introduced more easily than this.

The product arrived on time - and it's really good quality, would buy the same product from the same people again.

Adequate