This is one of the most disappointing books I have ever read. I have read a few books in the ".NET Development Series" before and have come to expect solid, easy to grasp, and useful information. This books fails on almost every account.
The explanations are inadequate. The author uses a lot of time to explain the obvious, while failing to explain more complex topics.
The language is really, really bad. An example: "Of course, there are many other applications of routing as well. As well, I fully expect that this specification will evolve over time."!!??
Maybe the most annoying thing about the book is all the dreadful typos and inconsistencies. I have never seen anything like it, and I cannot believe that anyone ever did any proofreading of this book. For example on page 35 he describes a very simple example of a Web Service, a class "TestClass" with one method "Add". On the next page is the image from Internet Explorer which shows what you see when you type the URL of the service on the server, the class is suddenly named "POClass". Later when he describes the SOAP Message for the service it is for another class altogether with a method "HelloWorld"???!!! In this example, it is easy to figure out what is wrong, and it is more annoying than anything else, but in other places where the material is not so easy to understand, the errors are harder to ignore.
Finally and maybe most importantly, the author fails to give any motivation for a lot of the things he does. For example, he describes how one in different ways (by using attributes, etc) can change the format of the soap messages for the service. However, he doesn't say a word about why one should prefer one format for the other.
