Review By: Dmitri Ilkaev
06/28/2010I would advise this book for anyone—whether you are a business or technical analyst, developer, architect, or manager trying to adapt or in the process of implementing SOA or extending in that area. Design experience would give an added perspective in understanding of this topic, but other IT groups should be able to benefit from this book as well. The author is very clear that this book is about designing services for SOA, not about designing SOA itself. This book also is not a tutorial about Web Services and SOA fundamentals or standards.

Part I engages in detailed discussion of fundamentals of service orientation and its origins. Part II of the book is about design principles and covers the topics such as service contracts, coupling, abstraction, reusability, autonomy, statelessness, discoverability, and composability. Each one of these topics gets a separate chapter. Part III features an in-depth comparison of service-orientation and object-orientation approaches, a discussion of organizational best practices to promote service orientation and how the service design principles described in Part II can be leveraged to realize strategic goals that were outlined in Part I.

This is also a good reference book on service design. A reader could pick up the book, find a topic and immediately gain understanding of it. The case studies at the end of each chapter are quite helpful along with the more than 240 illustrations in this book that help explain the concepts of service design.

One of the most prominent benefits of this book is in providing a methodology for designing services as well as establishing a reference framework against which any service design can be evaluated. With the presentation of a technology agnostic service design, this book should appeal to anyone who is interested in doing SOA, regardless of their choice of implementation technology.