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Web Services Essentials (O'Reilly XML) Review by Wendell Murray
Excellent, even though based on old SOAP specification
The O'Reilly series of books on web services, all based on outdated versions of the Apache SOAP (now Axis2) specification, are all very good and still valuable as a means of learning web services programming techniques.
The difficulty for beginners who are trying to learn SOAP or XML-RPC with these books is finding the appropriate jar files that match the SOAP specifications used for the code examples in the books. Using the current Axis2 or early Axis1 version jar files will not permit the examples or variants on them to work.
The needed jar files are still available in the archive section of the Apache website specifically at this URL: [...]. I used the last of the SOAP versions there version-2.3.1 which permits all the examples I tried in the various to work.
Most, if not all, of the other reviews here are from reviewers who bought the books when they were originally published around 2002.
The exposition in Programming Web Services with XML-RPC, Programming Web Services with SOAP and this book, Web Services Essentials, three books I bought used within the last year, i.e. in 2007, is quite good. Straightforward and accurate although obviously outdated in certain specifics, but nonetheless still an excellent introduction to web services.
My experience with books on software development and more generally on computers is that several books that cover the same topic should always be purchased because each provides a sufficiently different perspective on the topic that makes it much easier to master that material than would be the case with a single book, even if the single book were otherwise excellent. That recommendation applies to these three books. They cover more or less the same topic, but are even more valuable when taken as a whole.
I highly recommend any of the three, but emphasize the need to download the related (but now superseded) files from the Apache website so that the examples in the books will work correctly. If a reader does not do that, he or she will be condemned to much frustration and irritation.