The Definitive Guide to SOA: BEA AquaLogic Service Bus

What I like the most about this book is that the book explains more about HOW to use ALSB to create and manage web services than just how to use ALSB which you can learn by reading the documentation. I had played around with ALSB a few weeks before getting this book but had difficulty understanding some of the concepts and best practices. This book does a great job of explaining both the high-level concepts such as how to map your web services to your internal services/applications and low-level concepts like when to use a pipeline pair instead of a route. It also explains best practices for some issues which I have not been able to find anywhere else.

An ESB is in the core of most enterprise SOA implementations and AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB) is one of the leading ESB. This book covers all the features expected from a moderen ESB using realistic use cases and samples that run on ALSB. Once you downloaded the samples you will have a library of solutions that may be applied to your own projects or may be used to explore ALSB features. In addition the book covers the service design, specially the design of composite and orchestrated services deployed on the bus. Although the book is written particularly for ALSB, the topics covered in it will give you very good idea on any modern ESB. I found this book very useful for my projects; applied many of the solutions included in this book. I recommend it for new beginners as well as experienced service developers, SOA architects, and managers overseeing SOA projects.

I have read other SOA books. The Definitive Guide to SOA was a pleasant read. It was well worth for the price of the book. The book not only explains the concepts of SOA, but also shows how to practice SOA using BEA AquaLogic Service Bus. I have been using AquaLogic Service Bus for a while and have some familiarity. I found some new SOA techniques from this book that I was unaware of and are not available in the product documentation. Folks who are evaluating an ESB or using ALSB, should get a lot of value out of the book. Even for the folks who are new to SOA and want to learn the SOA concepts, this book is very useful. The best part is that you can download a copy of AquaLogic Service Bus from BEA's website and practice SOA applications as you read the chapters.