This book was a fantastic overview of how XML Web Services are encapsulated by the .NET platform and the services provided by the numerous APIs. It offers step-by-step examples that lead you through the various facets of producing and consuming Web Services. It does not delve too deeply into many of the services provided by .NET for bettor or worse.
Four years ago I would have rated this book a 4 star or higher, however, the examples are based upon legacy .NET 1.1 and Visual Studio 2003. Like myself, I would presume that the majority of developers are at least working with .NET 2.0 and VS 2005 now. In addition the current release of both is at 3.5 and 2008 respectively.
The core material of the book is still very much relevant. The examples for how to configure IIS, setup and copy web projects, and manipulate code in the IDE have changed significantly between product releases though. I didn't mind that much because it forced me to have to figure out how to apply the same task in the newer environment. For me that was OK, but beginners may be frustrated by that.
A few notes on the content and examples:
1. In the code exercises, I found that it would have been much more helpful to put the steps for importing classes (C# using / VB import statements) at the beginning of the code exercises instead of at the end so the person typing in the code could better make use of Visual Studio's Intellisense feature.
2. There was a lot of rote copy / retyping the same material from chapter to chapter. The author tried to minimize with copy instructions in each chapter. I felt as though the examples could have been modularized and reused better.
3. The Microsoft UDDI site that chapter 9 discusses no longer functions as described in the text. I skipped it completely.
4. Chapter 15 about consuming Web Services asynchronously was the one that probably had the most version differences between .NET 1.1 and 2.0. The way that callbacks are handled changed dramatically. This was once again a good learning experience for me to figure out how to make it work in 2.0
5. Code examples were generally good, however, the authors coding style for variable names was not all that intuitive. Maybe a short mention of naming convention would have been nice (e.g. what the 'p_' and 'x_' prefixes meant)
Overall, it is a good book and I would recommend it highly if you are still developing on .NET 1.1 / VS 2003, but less so if not. Hopefully, the authors will publish a newer edition sometime soon.
