Distributed

The cover says "Advanced" SOAP. This book is not.
I don't expect to see a book titled "Advanced" to simply
be a basic rehash of the specs that's readily available on
the internet.

And the author mentions that a certain topics aren't going to
be discussed because it's "...beyond the scope of this book."
I have a feeling, in fact, I'm pretty certain, that the word
"Advanced" was put on the cover as a ploy to sell more books.
At the price, it's not worth it at all. Maybe for a lot cheaper, it would be useful a useful companion to the spec. But why would you even spend that much on this book? You can just print the spec out yourself. But nothing more.

Don't bother buying this book. While its not terrible there are to many good books and web resources on SOAP to bother with this. It purports to be a book on advanced SOAP usage yet there seems to be nothing in it that is an advanced discussion of SOAP. The author really only spends 80 pages on SOAP it self-including preamble and non-related text. The rest of the book is UDDI, WSDL, HTTP, XML-RPC, BizTalk and like 167 pages or appendices which are rehashes of information that you can find on the web that are better presented.

The author also does not seem to know his topic very well and occasionally make statements such as SOAP may some day replace EDI which is silly since SOAP basically is a packaging protocol (he calls it a communication protocol which in some sense it is but only in a very general sense) basically defines how data is to be bundled, handled, and referenced. EDI deals with accountability, repudiation, complex exchange of data and programmatic information, is actually a standard, and is designed to model complex process while SOAP is not. Now if he said ebXML might replace EDI then I could take the statement seriously but SOAP will not be able to replace EDI. Its just does not have the capability and is not designed to.

Don't waste your money and your time on this book by the SAMS or Orielly books!

This book is meant for people who do not have web technology background and want to get some genernal knowledge about SOAP, XML, WSDL, and UDDI.

The author repeats the sentence "We will not be going into more detail here" for many, many important topics. It is definitely not an advanced SOAP book.

It seems that the author does not understand .NET very well. In Chapter 1, he explains the function of CLR engine as compiling IL code into Windows or Unix based code. Why UNIX? Will Microsoft .NET ever support Unix platform? He wrote the entire Chapter 11 trying to talk about BizTalk server. However, the very first sentence of Chapter 11 he wrote: "Chances are good that you've never used Microsoft's BizTalk server and that you never will". What is the point of writing this? In this whole chapter, he did not even mention that the most important functions of BizTalk are:
1. transform many different E*Commerce message formats (EDI, xCBL, cXML, SAP IDoc) into Microsoft XML doc.
2. XLANG scheduling and Orchestration.
3. Interface with Commerce Server and trading partners for catalog publishing and buying/selling.

The index of the book is not well organized either, missing lots of important references.

The book does not have enough diagrams to support the author's ideas or to describe the relationship among web technology components. You really need to read line by line to understand what he is trying to tell you about.

Final suggestion: Ask yourself what kind of SOAP book you are looking for.

The first exam I flunked on the course of my MCSE+I is this one and because I used this book. I generally obtained good scores with New Riders book, but this one is really bad. The sections are organized per the Microsoft exam, not in a text book fashion. For example, although the exam objective of Planning is first, it makes more sense to put it after you have the understanding of how Exchange works. If you don't have extensive experience with Exchange Server 5.5, this book will not be the one to introduce you to the concepts and certainly not to the exam! I used the book from Sybex (Chellis) to finally succeed in my exam.

I have no expirence with MS Exchange Server 5.5 and I'm trying to pass exam 70-081. I have failed to do 2 times now. Don't messure yourself againts the questions in the book and the sample test on the CD because a 100% means 50% in the real test. This book is NOT a training guide! It tells you the facts but it dosn't tell you why it's the fact. This book is more like a Fast Track book or so.

This is the last exam before I will become an MCSE and almost all my other books was Training Guides from Newriders. They were good but this really sucks! IF YOU ARE A NOVICE ON EXCHANGE LIKE ME, DON'T BUY IT!!!

I have some experience with Exchange and found this book very useful in preparing for the exam. If you followed the exercises it pretty much touched on all the areas needed for the exam. The layout of the book made it very useful for fast cramming too. It's obviously not a reference guide but a study guide which is what purports to be......and i do think someone with no Exchange experience could gain a lot of knowledge from reading and performing the exercises in this book.

This book will not help to pass the exam. The questions are not even similar to the exam's questions. Some things in the book are over explained, that you could think that the reader never have seen VB before, and other more complicated topics are just touched.
I would not recommend this book, not only because of waisted money, but because of waisted time.

This book explains VB 6 in simple language so that even the idiot can understand VB 6 features. However, the content is simple as well and can't help you to pass the exam.

Try the exam guide by Howard Hawhee. I'm not sure whether it is the best, but it is second to none so far.

Don't publishers proof read these books anymore? Numerous mistakes throughout the book including in the review questions. This book also does not cover things on the exam such as Compatibility settings. It seems as though the author just took the exam topics and wrote something that he thought was important, but not what Microsoft tested. Interestingly, one of the appendices contained test strategies that MS uses on the exams. Unfortunately the questions asked in the review exercises for the most part did not follow these guidelines.

The only worth this book has is that it provides a comprehensive list of BAPI currently available in SAP. Otherwise, it's a complete waste of time and money.

This is a useless book on SAP. Could not find any usefull material on any subject of SAP.

There is not any substance or detail in this text, it is about as usefull as marketing overheads. Having developed an interface
to BAPIs using Java, I can tell you that this book is of no help.

Bob

This is basically a poor rewrite of the on-line SAP documentation. There is nothing to learn from this book. I have found that all of these "Administering" books from Que are waste of paper. Spend you money elsewhere.

The book is not so informative who would like to understand the detailed functions of SAP PP module. The book contains no picture or screen shot. It's dealt with various functions but it doesn't seem to be enough.

As far as I can see these guys have made a big part of job about description of PP customizing and implementation. I am a PP consultant, and I find out a lot of very useful tips concerning this part of SAP R/3. An integration with CO and MM has also been described. So I recomend this issue to any interested in PP people.

What do you get when you rush a book to press?? A poorly written book for a very difficult test. I took the test and used this book for my first test on the MS 70-223 and I got burned. I then took the test after purchasing the Microsoft Training Kit and had no problems. I had a discussion with the author of the book by e-mail about my first failure. I then asked him two of the questions on the test that I did not understand. I got an answer back that pretty much said that he did not know the answer. Exam Crams are usually great. Do your self a favor and save the money for the Microsoft Training Kit. You will be better prepared for the test if you do.

The Exam Cram series is always a gamble. Most of them are winners; this one is a sure loser.

The Exam Cram strength has always been to cover the material MS requires on test. The first few chapters provide a good introduction to clustering and then the book covers the appropriate topics. Just not in the proper depth or clarity needed to pass the test. Add to this shortcoming the constant misspellings and worthless pratices tests and you lose.

Maybe this book will work if you have experience with MS Clustering and you just need to fill one or two gaps.

It's a good book, but don't get me wrong, you need a lot of real word of experience in deploying and maintaining MS clusters. Know the hardware components, specially Fibre Channel and Scsi,also installing and configuring physical componentsand groups. So I suggest first to be familiar with this concepts, as well as the cluster.exe parameters commands and the GUI of Cluster administrator.

Yet another example of how dangerous it is to impulse buy a computer book at a bookstore based on it's potential.

It's a great concept, but the depth of the errors and inconsistency in the language make it clear much of the content is surface level regurgation and not the teaching of someone who really gets it. There is much more wrong here than typos and cut and paste oversights; some of the errors are fundamental, and grievously misleading. Furthermore, I've tried to contact the publisher about corrections or explanations of specific issues and gotten no response.

The bright side is you will actually learn something as you struggle to understand how to make the examples work. It was painfull but I made progress using MSDN info and ATL source. I've also formed plenty of questions that I'm sure I'll now better apreciate expert answers for.

Beware, don't let it's potential suck you in. It took me way to long to give up on this book.

Other lessons learned:

1) Resist the bookstore computer book section, the odds are worse than the lotery. 2) Look for author's that stand behind their work with a personal email address for comments, questions, and suggestions. 3) Be extra suspicious of this publisher.

Here's a little blurb from the "Why is COM Needed" section:

"... Each compiler produces a set of machine language instructions (binary numbers) that are designed to be fed by the operating system into the CPU of the computer in structured ways to produce program behavior....".

With gems like that early in the book, how could I take the rest of the book seriously as a technical work? I pressed on, but basically the rest of the book seemed disorganized and filled more with studying example output from "wizards" and such.

Maybe if you're looking to study micros~1 Visual Studio "wizard" output, then this book is for you. If you're looking for a solid understanding of the basics, stay away.

BTW, ALL authors should lay off the lame attempts at humor. Readnig bad attempts at humor are much worse than reading a technical book that is dry.

The fact the Mr. Wallace dedicated two big chapters to ActiveX, which includes builds in both ATL and MFC makes this book a definite addition in my reference library. If you read this book from cover to cover you kind of get lost in the process but as a programmer how reads cover to cover you just read the section you need.

The best way to explain this book is, its a "good rough draft". Now go work on it some more. As is, the book is extremely hard to read. Crucial concepts are stated matter of factly, succinctly, and with little detail as possible, ie, just enough to get the point across (and that might be a stretch). The authors could make this a very good book, but they need to take much more time with every subject, and give more than one example. Furthermore the diagrams are sub-par. These diagrams could be greatly enhanced by professional technical artists. Also, the 2nd half of the book might be better interspersed with the 1st half. A *much* better read, with better diagrams, and a gentler approach on the exact same subject is "Distributed Operating Systems" by Andrew Tannenbaum.

This book is probably useful only at the University of Florida, since it follows the course lectures exactly - and that, because the first author is the instructor.

The book reads like a series of lecture notes, nothing more, nothing less. Several ideas that a student of operating systems may need to take note of, when making the transition from single-machine systems to multi-machine, are listed here. You can think of this book as a listing of a few basic ideas, with small expansions of each - as in a slideshow presentation. The merit of the book ends there.

The topics covered - in other words, the expansions of the listed ideas - are treated in a confused, sketchy manner. The material is insubstantial and hardly thought provoking. Motivation is absent, and pedagogical methods seem a distant concept. There is a near-total isolation of concepts and practice, and reading the book gives the feeling of being isolated in a dreamy sphere that belongs only to the author.

One could go on about such demerits, but to summarize, you don't need to buy this book unless it's required for your class. It's a slideshow in hardcover format.

This is a not so good book, but our school uses it. I suggest the author to update some of the contents of the book.

I read the reviews with regrets initially anticipating a good introduction to SAP consulting. Any recommendations?

This book is so incredibly contrived, I'm not sure where to begin. How about the part about recommending that a consultant learn to type fast, as it allows one to get more work done per minute and gives the impression that you are busy? In the end, it's just another thinly-veiled attempt by some self-appointed "experts" to cash in on the R/3 phenomenon. There are better books out there that provide a lot more knowledgeable insight on being an independent consultant; they might not be SAP-specific, but neither is a lot of this book's content--in spite of its title.

The topic of becoming an SAP consultant has been so over-exploited in the past several years in newsgroups and chat rooms. Now, the authors have done the same thing in their book. The SAP market has shrunk tremendously in the past 12 mos. Launching yourself into the SAP world now is like closing the barn door after the horse is a mile down the road. On content, the book is filled with fluff. As other reviewers have pointed out, all the stuff in this book is freely available elsewhere. Pass on this one.

There are only 13 pages which detail how to create your own BAPI and the extra 50 pages on BAPIs mearly list the BAPIs that SAP delivers with less documentation than SAP already gives in their BAPI transaction...

Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to look at the book before buying it because I bought it at a large conference in between classes. If I had spent 5 minutes looking at it before I bought it, I wouldn't have. But since the previous ABAP book from the same publishing company was of very good quality, I bought it thinking it would be the same quality. Since buying the book last year I've only looked at it for about 20 minutes. I would not recommend.

One of the junk books I;ve read lately. Poor content, structure and presentation. Lots of pages but no information. The authors/publishers tried very hard to increase the book size with all sorts of tricks. About thirty pages of the book are either blank or have chapter titles but no useful info. Not many useful code samples. The chapters on Java, OOP etc are really not necessary as there are lot of excellent tutorials/free books available on the internet. Very little information on the actual Java&BAPI as the title suggests. I;ve noticed a couple of errors in the Java related chapters. I will be very surprised if rest of the book is error free. Please do not waste your money by buying this POS.

I wish the authors put more content on the interaction of Java and BAPI, with more example codes on how to use Java to call BAPI etc. It would be perfect if they could use some real-world sample codes or lead their readers go through some complete exercise. Instead, the authors put lots of unnecessary information there, which we can find more in detail from other sources. We do not get what we really want from this book. I am surprised this book even got published.