web programming

The use of the term "Field Guide" in the title is intended to communicate that this book's format does not comply with traditional tutorial or process-oriented books. This guide consists of a collection of strategies and best practices, and is intended to act as a reference guide, providing advice for a variety of common integration scenarios.

As a guide to integration this book was intentionally kept vendor-neutral. It concentrates on the concepts and standards behind XML, Web Services, and contemporary SOAs, and therefore does not cover vendor-specific implementations. There are many other books that already do an excellent job of documenting vendor products and proprietary technology. Our goal was to produce a book that introduces emerging standards, but focuses on the use of established open standards as they relate to common architectures and integration problems. I'd therefore recommend this book as a companion guide to any existing product documentation you may have.

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This book is an excellent guide for architects, developers, and managers that are already working with or are considering to develop Web Services or Service-Oriented Architecture solutions. The book is divided into four sections. In the first section the fundamental technologies of XML, Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures are described in detail with attention given to emerging standards.

In the next section, Integrating Technology, the book takes a closer look at how services can be modeled describing strategies for integration, enhancing performance, and developing interfaces.

The third section, Integrating Applications, will be of value to even seasoned architects. Here the different levels of integration that need to be considered, at the data level, process level, application level, and interface level are looked at. This section also discusses integration issues with legacy systems. The section completes with a look at SOA strategies and patterns and how they may be utilized in a design.

In the last section, Integrating Enterprise, the author leaves you with a guide for managing and developing service-oriented projects, providing a list of best practices and trade-offs to consider.

The book is well written and very thorough in its coverage of the subject. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in enterprise level service architectures.

If you think about the software development world as architects and engineers. Where architects take a very high level view of the world and don't get into fine grained implementation details. Then if you consider yourself this kind of architect, you will get a lot out of this book.

Though the book is fairly long (~500 pages) the depth of the content is still at the 'field guide' level. This means that the book focuses more on understanding the components of SOA at a holistic level without getting too deep into implementation details.

The first chapter of the book does delve into the basics of the XML core technologies (XML, XML validation, XSL, etc.). After that the book stays at the high level, describing most of the concepts with graphics that do an excellent job showing the document flow between systems.

I recommend this book to architects involved with XML based systems integration projects. I also recommend the book for engineers involved with these types of projects because they will benefit from the high level overview of the entire range of XML technologies.