Programming Web Services with Soap: Building Distributed Applications

If you are new to SOAP and you want to get the overall picture, and you don't care for details, this is the book you need.If you need a reference guide, this is not the book you want.If you're looking for a book about SOAP on a particular platform (say Java), this is not the book you need.

If your pretty new at SOAP, and if you need an overview, then this is the book you want.If you don't care about interoperability, and you just want a book on SOAP within a particular environment (say Java), then this is not the book you want.If you need a reference guide, then you don't need this book.

This book is a nice introduction to SOAP. It doesn't get caught in the Software wars and has examples of most existing systems. Another advantage: it is a thin book and not a 1000 pages bible. So you can easily read it in a weekend and then decide where you want to dig deeper (if necessary).

...This is an excellent book, very much on par with O'Reilly and deserving of it's current top ranking at the Web Services Journal Reader's Choice Awards. The book IS short (thank god) which is one of its strong points as it doesn't wax on about tons of useless crap and gets straight to the point. It also doesn't gloss over the areas where Web services technology is still lacking today (uh, security) and shows some nice simple examples to help developers get started. Great book, well worth the price and the time. Definite buy.