Authors: Amit Bahree, Shawn Cicoria, Dennis Mulder, Nishith Pathak, and Chris Peiris
Publisher: Apress
ISBN10: 1-59059-702-8
ISBN13: 978-1-59059-702-6
Stars: ** 2/5
Finishing this book I came away feeling a bit disappointed. Apart from The Pragmatic Bookshelf I hold Apress as the bar for other publishers (Microsoft Press sadly right now Microsoft Press lies at the bottom) and this book doesn't make the grade. If I didn't know who the publisher was before reading this book I would never have guessed it was Apress.
Writing Style
You can tell that this book was written by multiple authors. Though the writing style did seem to flow on most occasions, in others things seemed to jump around. This is especially true when it came to the QuickReturns Ltd. case study. Early on in the book the transition from discussing a technical aspect to the case study was seamless. Later on in the a transition from the two was very abrupt. This made it very obvious that the authors working on the meat of the book didn't always work together with the author of the case study. This made the book seem a bit too dry to keep anyone's attention for too long.
It also seemed that the authors were trying to hit a certain page count in writing the book. Every few pages it will seem like your reading the same paragraph over again that you read in a previous chapter. If all of the filler was taken out the page count would have been reduced by at least 10%.
Best Practices
Another disappointment was the fact that the authors kept saying something to the effect of "this is just an example and is not a best practice" but then never really went into what the best practices are. This book should not have ended with chapter 13 discussing the implementation of SOA interoperability. Instead the book should have continued on to chapter 14 to present the QuickReturns Ltd. case study in a real world, enterprise, best practices scenario. With the lack of this final chapter the book is left dry and somewhat useless outside of academia.
Errors
Littered throughout the book are numerous technical and grammatical mistakes. When I started reading the book I had the full entintion of making note of each mistake to report back to Apress, but sadly I only made it a third of the way through before giving up, and glad I did.
The book has been out for almost two years (January 15, 2007) and Apress only has one correction on the errata page. This shows that there have been numerous readers like me who took the time to point out the errors but have gone unnoticed by Apress and the authors.
Summary
I know I've said a lot of negative things about this book but overall for me it served its purpose. My intention for this book was to be a supplement for Microsoft's .Net Framework 3.5 - Windows Communication Foundation Training Kit in my attempt to pass the 70-503 exam at the end of this month. In that regard, I'll say again, it served its purpose.
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