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Joeychgo.com Book Store > Joeychgo.com books beginning with S
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Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology |
Author: Eric A. Marks
Published: 2006-04-28 |
List price: $59.95
Our price: $37.77
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As of: January 07th, 2009 03:22:15 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Redundant, Obvious, Vacuous
The book is a decent entry point into the somewhat muddled world of SOA. I rate it a 1 star, however, because the book is heavy on marketing hype and light on details/content. I bought this book primarily because it had consistent high ratings from other reviewers, but I think it's likely that these reviewers are fake, just propping up the rating (if you look at most of the 5 star reviewers, they only rate one book - this one).
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br /The book paints SOA as the ultimate enterprise IT panacea. The solution to all of your business problems. SOA of course can ameliorate some of the tangle of entprise architecture, but I believe, as Fred Brooks said, "there's no silver bullet".
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br /For example, take this statement:
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br /"Although nearly every business and IT executive for the last 30 years has wistfully dreamed of achieving business agility, there has been little real progress toward that end save for a few exceptional firms. For most organizations, business agility is a vision without reality. Until now. SOA and services provide a means to achieving true business agility."
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br /Obviously this is massive hyperbole. There have of course been a myriad of improvements in business agility in the past 30 years, some big, some small. Take the PC, the internet, the web, oo, uml, automated testing, open source, faster hardware, etc. These have all helped businesses build software faster, cheaper, better. The problem is that complexity has out-paced us, not that SOA is filling a void of improvements.
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br /They buttress these sweeping statements with numbers, but those too seem a bit groundless (at least I saw no footnotes to back these up). For example:
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br /"Imagine you can launch new products and services 30% faster than your competitors because you eliminated friction within your enterprise..."
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br /...or...
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br /"The time to implement needed system changes to support these new products has been cut by 25%..."
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br /Further, the book is also quite redundant and obvious. Take chapter 2 - section: "SOA is all about Services". First sentence:
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br /"Service-oriented architecture is nothing without services."
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br /Probably true, but it's a bit like like saying "Object Oriented Design is nothing without objects". Next sentence:
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br /"Services are the primary asset of SOA".
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br /Two sentences later:
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br /"The fundamental unit of an SOA is a service."
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br /3 sentences later:
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br /"An SOA with services is useless unless those available services actually are consumed."
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br /Sure, but any system is useless unless there are users or consumers. And finally, to sum up the section, they end on:
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br /"But why are services so important to an SOA? ..."
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br /Anyway, I'm sorry to bash this book so hard, but I felt compelled to write this review because (a) the book is pretty light on content and (b) I feel like there is some duplicity in all these positive reviews...and if that's the case, it's disappointing.
 AN EXCELLENT TECHNOLOGY BOOK
This book is an excellent SOA technological introduction that presents major architectural concerns that most architects, team leads, developers, and software modelers struggle with. It addresses fundamental service-oriented challenges and provides viable solutions that IT professionals can employ:
br /- A service lifecycle that identifies major modeling disciplines
br /- Introduction to service-oriented analysis, design, and realization
br /- Introduction to service-oriented technologies
br /- A service-oriented integration model that provide viable interoperable solutions
br /- Service reusability model that elaborates on various methods that can facilitate asset reuse in organizations
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br /I'd recommend this book to IT personnel and SOA practitioners that would like to learn more about starting service-oriented projects and achieving effective results.
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Business Focused SOA
This book is a must read for the Executive and Architect responsible for transforming their business processes and IT infrastructure from something resembling an anchor to an agile, flexible system that enables corporate progress. This book will show you a process that will help you get off step 0, define the right services, and ensure that your SOA efforts resolve your business and IT challenges. When implementing an SOA, the technology is the easy part, ensuring that services are created in a consistent manner, that they are designed with reuse in mind, that s/w creation, and hence new product development, gets less expensive and takes less time, over time, that's the hard part, that's where SOA Governance comes in, and this book will give you the SOA Governance basics you need to get your SOA transformation off to a good start. Get control of Governance and your 75% there. This book will not provide code snippets, developer advice, or describe technical specifications, if you want these things, get Thomas Url' or Greg Lomow' books. This book is about using a top-down business service analysis, bottom-up implementation considered, iterative SOA design model. Read it to develop or improve your SOA planning capabilities.
Still Obfuscated Abomination
Amazon deleted my last negative review so I'm writing another one. This book is nothing but middle manager buzzwards and little content. Beware all the 5 star 'real name' reviews below. Someone is stacking the deck on this one.
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 Not for a Developer
Note: My strong dislike of this book probably says more about me than the book...
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br /As a developer I like books that bridge the technical and the business gap. I need to see, in concrete examples, how things might be implemented -- I want to see code, configuration documents, snippets of policy code etc. I also find it helpful when books build upon a sample application. I wanted to see examples of the technology that enables SOA, walk-thrus of standards such WSPL.
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br /This book has none of that. To me it is a book of high-level lists of lists and every section I've read leaves me wondering what it said. I think they repeat themselves too much and the book seems poorly organized with material half way through a chapter which seemed to me to belong at the start. For all it being high-level, they make an assumption that the reader is familiar with a host of acronyms and/or the technology behind them.
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