Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies

If you are not an IT guy and for a long time you have been thinking that SOA is only related to IT, then this book is a good starting point to understand, and make others understand, that SOA has everything to do with business. Using simple examples, this book will guide you through the different elements of SOA and will help you to understant it's potential.

I like this book because it is easy to read and it explains basic SOA concepts. This book will help you understand the major concepts but it is not a book that can get you started building services, SOA infrastructure and middleware. And it is obviously not for dummies!

I have always been seriously put off by the "Dummies" series. I would like to buy books that assume some intelligence on the part of the reader. I don't like being talked down to. But this book doesn't do that. Instead it explains concepts clearly, and has been a great help to me in understanding the clouds of jargon that surround this topic. The explanation of the components of SOA and how they hook together is excellent! Because I am not yet directly involved, I cannot judge the accuracy of their details (and of course, they may change over time), but since the objective is to get the main concepts across, I believe the authors are successful. I really wish, though, that the series were called "Achieving Buzzword Compliance in ...".

It has been a few years since I worked with Web Services so I was looking for a book that would get me started again. This book did the trick. In addition to the ramp up, I also appreciated the end material including chapters for each major SOA vendor and a good glossary.

It's hard to imagine how anyone even remotely aware of SOA could be classified as a `dummy'. But, looked at another way, this book's title `SOA for Dummies' makes perfect sense. The authors - all from the consulting firm Hurwitz and Associates - strongly believe that SOA has the makings of one of those disruptive new technologies that have a way of sweeping quite suddenly into the broader market and abruptly upsetting the established order. If that turns out to be true, then at this moment we are all probably dummies about SOA and its future impact, and we better read this book right away. But what makes SOA such a big deal? After all, the authors freely admit that the commercial SOA industry is just in its early stages. At the same time, however, they contend that SOA is important because it directly addresses one of the biggest problems that companies have today - how to make their computing environment nimble enough to keep up with the fast-changing needs of today's frenetically globalizing business environment. Once upon a time, Hurwitz reminds us, your company's computers probably sat in a protected white room, serving a few privileged users inside your own enterprise. Those users were supported by a set of custom-built software applications sporting ugly, hard-to-use, text-based `green screens'. Each such application lived in its own little world or `silo', often hosted on its own mainframe partition or even a special set of hardware. Maintaining and updating these applications was a major chore, and exchanging information among the various silos was a daunting task. Mergers and acquisitions compounded the problem, creating a veritable tower of techno-babble. As for opening those applications up to outside users, this was virtually unheard of and, as yet, thankfully uncalled for. Fast-forward just a few years to our current Internet era. Your company's whole computing environment is now just a small fishing boat bobbing around in the enormous virtual, global computing sea called the Internet. Your outside users, particularly your on-line customers and partners, now probably rate a higher priority than your inside users, and they are almost certainly more diverse and numerous. Moreover, they expect to see a graphically attractive, client-centric view of your enterprise using a universal standard interface - the Web-enabled browser. What's a poor CIO to do? Understandably, it is taking a while for most organizations to catch up. The big problem is not so much cranking out new Web-enabled applications. The real problem is breaking apart those old siloed applications, which unfortunately contain most of the critical data and business logic that the fancy new applications need to function. But building custom bridges between all the new applications and all the old ones they need just creates an even worse development and maintenance nightmare, as many organizations are now learning the hard way. That's where SOA comes in. Accor