Books for Prep









Rating: 1 out of 5 stars - Dishonest authors
These folks use my book, "How to Open Locks With Improvised Tools" in their work. They stated that my book was published by Harper Collins in 1997. The first version, "Lock Bypass Methods" was published in 1998, and the version they cite was published in 2001, by Level Four Publications. The title page, including contact info in my book, is concise and clear. Harper Collins has never touched it. No, they didn't ask permission for use, and there are so many spelling and grammatical errors that it is obvious they cut corners in other places, too. Since they're happy to invent spurious references when the real thing is readily available, I wouldn't hold much faith whatever else they cranked out. I'm sorry my name shows up in their shoddy work.



Rating: 2 out of 5 stars - Disappointed
There were a few decent pieces of information, but overall I was not very impressed. Some of the content was OK, but the grammatical errors and different writing styles made it a very disappointing read. There were four different authors which contributed to the flow problems, and it was obvious that some of the chapters were more poorly written than others. In addition, it didn't seem like anyone even proofed the book. I can understand a few errors, but I found myself re-reading sentence after sentence trying to understand what words were missing, misspelled or out-of-place.

The chapter on transactions was pretty decent. I liked the information on compensating transactions, which I had heard called three phase commit previously. The chapter on UDDI was pretty decent as well. I was disappointed in the last chapter on Event-Driven Architecture. It just seemed to be a hodge-podge catch all of the author's thoughts without much meat.



Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - use BPEL for workflow
This topical book takes us through the many facets of SOA. It can help you understand and implement an SOA redesign of your company's software assets. One of the promises of SOA is that the redesign can start at a higher level. Not at the software or the design of the software per se, but at modelling the workflow and business process management. The book bundles these under the label of "Orchestration" and explains how the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) offers the expressive power to document them. Actually, BPEL can do more than document. There is a prospect here that BPEL can be used to implement how the workflow proceeds, at the level of Web Services. Of course, the latter still have to be written. The reader needs to appreciate that the bulk of the work resides outside the book's scope, in the coding of those Web Services.

The book shows the considerable potential of SOA.



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Great contribution to SOA thinking
Although I am not a friend of any of the authors, I find this book great. The first chapter is not only an excellent introduction to SOA; it also addressed the change of mindset you have to implement to succeed. The requirement discussion is chapter two is also excellent. It challenges the use-case driven development from RUP (and other story-based development methods) and shows how a successful SOA implementation within IT and business makes it possible to make a simple and direct mapping from business requirements to services. I also find the emphasis on information services important! The proposed method for requirement management will definitely change the mindset for both programmers and business people - and increase business agility within the enterprise.

The rest of the book covers the fundamentals of SOA in a very compact format. Spending time on this book seems to be a good investment.



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Excellent Book with Real Material
James is my best friend and have worked with him in the past and current. This book on SOA is a highly recommended book for companies trying to get into the SOA space. Concepts cleanly explained with implementation details. Great book if it were to be used in academic realm or to be used by people in the industry.





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