Eric Siron said
This book probably only deserves 2 to 2.5 stars, but Amazon doesn't allow that. I rounded up to offset an unfair 1-star review. There is nothing in the description or the jacket claiming anything about web services. If that's what you're after, go back and look specifically for "web services" or WCF or ASP.NET.
As for this book, the author is clearly knowledgeable on the subject and does share some of that with the reader. That's really the end of the positives. The typos in this book start out distracting and end up damaging. The instructional text is typo-free enough to get by but don't expect to just key in the code and have it operate. Most of it won't even get through VB's on-the-fly syntax checker. For the first few chapters, anyone who is actually at the programming level that s/he should be tackling this topic can probably fix the code without help, but in later chapters it strays too far for any quick intuition to fix. You'll need to follow the extremely convoluted route of getting to the "companion site" to download the code. People like me that follow along better when keying in the code than just reading over provided code are going to have issues here.
The book presents a project in the first chapter and builds on it continuously as you move through the book. However, the beginning of chapter 6 tells you to roll back to chapter 4 code. That's all well and good, except that no expectation is ever set that you'll have any need to maintain chapter-by-chapter snapshots. It happens again in a later chapter, but by then you should have learned your lesson.
The book's organization leaves quite a bit to be desired. Everything makes sense in the order in which it is presented, but if you intend to refer back to something later, be prepared to look in a chapter with an entirely different title. The index deserves a rousing "meh", so be prepared to use your own bookmarks for subjects you'll want to revisit.
In the "Advanced Security Considerations and Communications" chapter, the author actually recommends a "security by obscurity" approach (bottom of page 228) without so much as a tiny warning about how that isn't really "securing" anything. Again, anyone reading at this level should already be aware of the futility of this method, but anyone writing at this level should also be aware of it. There is still plenty of good knowledge in this chapter about security, but that one paragraph is a major red flag.
The book begins to feel extremely rushed around chapter 12, to the point I was questioning whether or not the material was finished. Chapter 12 talks about "scheduling", which I would think of addressing a topic such as "I want
To continue with the "rushed" theme, the next part of the same chapter talks about setting up UIs to administer your service. There are no examples of any kind on how to actually do this. I'd still say anyone reading at this level can probably figure out how to do it, but anyone who can do it probably already sees the value and doesn't need to be told to do it, so either this section should have been fully fleshed out with a how-to example (it is a how-to book, after all), or it should have been skipped entirely.
A major issue I take with the author's instructional method is in his code presentation. I'm not talking about the horrid formatting or the non-functional bits, all of which could have and should have been caught by an even minimally competent editor. I'm talking about the order in which he presents his code. He'll have you typing in function calls and accessing variables that he hasn't had you design or define yet. The immediate problem is that IntelliSense sometimes "fixes" these for you and converts what you typed into something else entirely, which can lead to confusion if you notice it happened or a serious, tough-to-find bug if you don't. The second issue with this is that you really have no idea why you're coding what you're coding, which defeats the purpose of being instructed at all. The third issue with this is that, given the horrible condition of the code in general, you can never be sure if he'll come back later and actually give you the missing code or if it's just another unfinished stub. Besides all that, calling as-yet undefined variables and functions is just bad coding practice, especially in an instructional book. The coding quality is also injured by the seemingly random mixing of Hungarian notation, camel casing, and other coding standards.
Overall, if the subject matter interests you, you have a real need or desire to acquire the knowledge, and you're already at least a somewhat experienced programmer, this book will help you. You can't tackle this book as a novice or you'll definitely end up more lost than when you started. If the concepts this book presents bore you, you might easily get lost in all the quirks and wind up learning nothing.
M. Wittenburg said
This book is pretty neat - it covers all aspects of Windows services (security, operational management, deployment, comms...) and what I really like is the section (actually, it spans more than a chapter) on threading. One of the best I've seen, and a great pattern.
John M. Wargo said
The product description says the book is all about creating Web Services but this is nowhere near the truth. True, it does contain a few pages on building web services, but not like described in the book.
I expected it to help me understand how to build web services in Visual Studio 2008, but even the 'Software as a Service' reference was misleading. Don't buy this book if you want to know more about Software as a Service or Web Services - you will be seriously disappointed,
MikeMSCEPE said
I'm only on chapter 2 and there has already been many errors in the written code. I can't imagine how bad the other chapters will be.
E. Hibbs said
Excellent book. Well written. Covers main topics needed to write services for IT automation. Highly recommended.
Comments