.Net Web Services for Dummies

This book was a joy to read and presented a great holistic approach to .net web services. By that I mean it covered the subject from A to Z including such relevant topics as firewalls, SSL, RAID, UDDI, etc. It is important to have an understanding of the whole infrastructure encompassed by .net web services. I have a background in programming including some web development 4 years ago (prior to .net). Yet I found the book very informative and am thankful I got over my 'a dummy book is not for me' attitude. For example, the author did a history of COM, DCOM, COM+ in nutshell that really helped explain the problems web services solved.The book goes into web services development in enough detail to get you started coding. For serious development you would want a more detailed reference but this is a great starting point.The author has demonstrated an excellent grasp of the web development landscape and put it all together in a cohesive fashion. If you want to find out what the .net furor is all about I highly recommend this author.

Despite the previous reviewer's assertion that this book is too advanced for the "dummies" line, I am sure that if you read this book *closely* all of your basic questions would be answered. I actually think the author did an amazing job of incorporating and summarizing much of what seems like an insurmountable topic,.NET, XML and Web Services, in one book.Kudos to the author. I highly recommend this book for .NET overview and intro to web services. It will even have you constructing, debugging and deploying them in no time.