The Second Edition of Building Web Services with Java builds on the expert insight offered in the award-winning first edition. See why this book won the Web Services Journal’s Editor’s Chioce award. The authors are among the leading architects of Web services standards and include current and former members of IBM’s Web services team, the W3C XML Protocol Working Group, Apache’s Axis project, and various Java expert groups. They bring insider insight into the design and creation of the tools covered in the book, and an understanding of the problems faced by developers putting these tools to work.

Building Web Services with SOAP, XML, and UDDI assumes proficiency with Java and with distributed computing tools. Throughout the book, examples will be presented using Java and the Apache SOAP platform, although a set of sidebars will address .NET development, which Microsoft developers will use to deploy Web services. The book uses progressive disclosure to present an increasingly complex project as it moves through its development cycle. The final section of the book presents linking the completed project with other systems built in J2EE and .NET.

Sams has assembled a team of experts in web services to provide you with a detailed reference guide on XML, SOAP, USDL and UDDI. Building Web Services with Java is in its second edition and it includes the newest standards for managing security, transactions, reliability and interoperability in web service applications. Go beyond the explanations of standards and find out how and why these tools were designed as they are and focus on practical examples of each concept. Download your source code from the publisher’s website and work with a running example of a full enterprise solution. Learn from the best in Building Web Services with Java.

In Building Web Services with Java, Second Edition, architects from IBM who helped create the core Web services standards explain how to use those standards to build Web services applications. They go beyond the specifications and provide meaningful insights into both how and why these tools were designed as they are. This revised edition covers the new SOAP 1.2 and WSDL 1.2 standards, as well as other technologies developed since the first edition was published, including the Java Web Services Developer Pack from Sun and the powerful Apache Axis Web services engine. Throughout the book the authors focus on practical examples of each concept and provide a running example illustrating a full enterprise solution.

Extremely Poor
Without a doubt one of the worst computer books I have ever bought. The intent of buying a book about programming is to actually learn programming. I have fought the XML section until I have a screaming headache with very little accomplished. So far I have found it impossible to get the so-called examples to run. The source code is not available from the publisher in spite of what others may tell you. Yes, there is a file to be downloaded. However, it has almost none of the source code in it. For example, it only contains the source code for one .jsp file for the entire 2nd chapter. The writing style is practically incomprehensible, jumping around all over the place without ever finishing anything. There are nine authors listed on the cover. Perhaps that is why this book is such a clusterf#@k. How did this thing get to a 2nd printing? STAY AWAY FROM THIS BOOK. I cannot stress that enough.

The Bridge Less Travelled..
The problem with Learning Web Services is just one - there is too much happening..the technology has grappled everyone’s attention and a lot of Organizations are on it..
A beginner to web services just doesn’t know where to look..strong foundations give ’empire estates’, this book does just that
The primer on XML was one of the best i ever read anywhere and i am a big fan of Dr.Google, the clarity of the authors on WSDL Element model is very informative. All in all - if you need a book to trace Web Service concepts and build your foundations - i would strongly refer this book.

If you are looking for a quick reference/book to get started in implementation you should look elsewhere..Sam’s ’Teach Yourself Web Services in 24 Hours’ is a good choice..but then i believe that this book is definitely worth a reference because it goes a distance conceptually.
Kudos to the authors

An excellent book
This book has helped me immensely in implementing some really intense production quality data interchange across systems using web services.

This book will quickly help you understand the entire XML stack of technologies that you will need for Web Services.

The authors have uniquely enabled the readers to develop an understanding of the underlying technologies that make up the web services. Certainly expect to put in some effort in understanding the content.

The worst book
The writers either do not understand the topics, or they want to confuse the readers intentionally. You will find their writing style extremly annoying. They use the Skatestown(??) example to mislead the readers whenever they need to explain something. I dont know how such a bad written book can make it out to the book stores. If you buy this book, it will be the biggest waste of money.

sample code is not complete
I am still wondering why the authors don’t provide all the code, since the book describes an application and that should have been tested and the code is there. Just a few wsdl files don’t help very much.

Samples
There is an important thing missing in this book: complete samples. It is hard sometimes to understand what they are explaning since you just see a fragment of a WSDD, but not the classes or vice-versa. Since the book is already too long, the authors should have samples in the Internet. They even don’t need to explain too much about these complete samples. Leave the developers to comment and validate them in Internet forums. In my view, samples will transform what now is just a so-so book in an excellent one.

Poor for working schmucks, great for students
This book can be summed up in one word: bloated. It is too heavy and based on theory rather than real-world examples and summarized concepts. I am a product developer in the working world, and I simply don’t have time to churn through this huge book. The only chapter that was slightly relevant was the one on Apache Axis. If you want to learn the ins and outs of web services from a theoretical and architectural standpoint, this might be your book. Otherwise I would go with another book if you want working examples and concise writing.

Poor for working schmucks, great for students
This book can be summed up in one word_ bloated. It is too heavy and based on theory rather than real-world examples and summarized concepts. I am a product developer in the working world, and I simply don’t have time to churn through this huge book. The only chapter that was slightly relevant was the one on Apache Axis. If you want to learn the ins and outs of web services from a theoretical and architectural standpoint, this might be your book. Otherwise I would go with another book if you want working examples and concise writing.

too heavy?
[A review of the SECOND EDITION, 2004.]

Web Services are this potential hot new field that has been built out with a lot of proposed standards. This book goes through them, with an emphasis on implementing applications in Java. The basic idea is a set of loosely coupled programs, scattered across a computer network, which invariably is the Internet or a private Internet. Loosely coupled means asynchronous, which then favours a nonblocking message passing approach, as opposed to a blocking RPC-type setup. The messages are sent as XML. Which is independent of platform and programming language. So the book shows how to use XML in WS.

But these programs on the network need to find each other. So we have UDDI being explained in the book.

A large part of the book is given over to how to describe a WS. A massive standard syntax has arisen, WSDL, which is expressed in XML. Like any other book on it, this conveys the sheer verbosity of WSDL. The industry bodies that built it tried to make it expressive enough for any plausible (though yet unimplemented) usage. The problem is that WSDL is now complex and hard to learn. It is not the book itself that is bloated, but what it faithfully describes.

One might wonder. Is WSDL too heavy? Could it end up like X.400 and X.500? There are indeed implementations of these, but on only a few websites.

Wide coverage but bloated
Updated coverage of core web services componenets, as well as some new stuff around the corner. While it seems up-to-date and has wide coverage of topics, it is written in a bloated style and painful to wade thru the chatty naratives to get at the factual information. Would have been good if the fluffy bit were reduced and the volume halved. A quicker route may be to go with the W3C specs - some of these include tutorials as well.