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I must confess some misgivings before publishing my review of SOA for Dummies. We were pleased to be able to offer attendees to our webinars and SOA in Action virtual conference an Amazon best seller - good for everyone. But I felt uncomfortable about promoting the book without first giving my honest review of it. However, now that I have, I feel quite comfortable about offering it. Read it and decide for yourself.

The publisher assured me the authors are very proud of their book and plan to respond. I welcome their response. I also welcome any reviews of my findings. I truly tried to be as factual as possible, to illustrate the important issues i had with the book. But I also praised the writing style, citing some clever headlines. Richard W., an educator in a business school, commented that he likes it because while "the existing professional books on SOA, BPM, etc. are generally unsuited for student use," SOA for Dummies is "approachable and readable". I totally agree with him there. He also seconds "the call for a Wiki-based approach to not only SOA but also the related areas such as BPM, EDA/BAM".

We think the Wiki is a great idea and plan to implement it soon.

I also checked the Web to see how others reviewed the book. There were 6 reviews on Amazon, most of them good. The book is rated 4.5 out of 5 and is the #2 SOA book on Amazon.

But I also found a review by Richard Akerman, technology architect and information security officer at NRC CISTI, Canada's National Science Library and Publisher, that seemed to agree with much of what I had to say.

"I also want to address the SOA Supervisor, and the whole idea of automatically monitoring Service-Level Agreements. I think this is very deep voodoo."

"This chapter starts out with a strong statement, unfortunately, one I disagree with: Adapters make SOA possible. No adapters, no SOA -- it's as simple as that" and concludes "I have to admit my final written note on this chapter reads, simply: this chapter is baloney.

Have you read the book? What is your opinion?

Posted by bethgb at 04:06 PM in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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