Pandora's Box: Social and Professional Issues of the Information Age Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)It is a good book and it is highly recommended for anyone that is able to read whether he/she has contact with the computer or now. The social issues raised are all encompassing.

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Pro PayPal E-Commerce (Expert's Voice) Review

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(More customer reviews)The book did a good job of covering everything EXCEPT the Paypal API. It had a smattering of samples in PHP, Java, C#, VB, and Perl up until that point.
Once the PayPal API is discussed, there are only a couple of samples and everything in Java despite the growing (and perhaps exceeding) popularity of PHP for website development. While not entirely the author's fault given the poor shape of PayPal PHP SDK, it was disappointing that so little time and explaination was given on how to use Paypal's API. If you're looking for help integrating PHP with the Paypal API for Website Payments Pro or Express Payment, you're out of luck. This book won't help.
This is unfortunate since the Paypal API is the most complex part of integration and perhaps the reason you would buy a book like this since many of the other integrations such as IPN are fairly easy by comparison.
The book does do a good job of working you through IPN integration, so if that's what you need, then this book will help.
Having had to now try and learn the PayPal API on my own, it does seem like it's fundamentally 'over-complex' and Paypals SDKs do little to hide the complexity. Perhaps the Java SDK is in better shape, but the PHP one is a bear to get configured and working correctly

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With over 100 million users, PayPal has more accounts than Discover and American Express combined. Since its inception in 1998, PayPal has quickly grown to become the global standard for online payments and is constantly expanding into new countries, languages, and currencies. PayPal offers a wide range of payment technologies, but it's not always clear which is the best choice for a website. This book gets under the hood to show you how the different technologies work, how to choose the right solution, and how to implement it - complete with real-world examples.This book shows developers how to integrate PayPal directly into websites to make use of its payment technologies. This allows developers, no matter what language they program in, to build shopping carts or similar channel products with PayPal as a payment option. Merchants can also use this book to find out the basics of e-commerce, where PayPal fits in, and how they could take a DIY approach to solving their e-commerce needs.

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Web Services: Principles and Technology Review

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(More customer reviews)This book stands out from the vast array of contemporary SOA and Web services literature in many ways:
1) It presents business context and technical requirements for Web services design on an adequate level of detail.
2) It provides important historical insight without putting the reader to sleep.
3) It covers relevant related work such as e-business, EAI, and networking as needed, unlike most other Web services books.
4) It separates abstract concepts such as messaging from implementation technology such as JMS appropriately, but shows the connections when needed.
5) It builds up a non-trivial example that demonstrates how the various specifications fit together, many unique illustrations help to digest.
6) It has non-trivial exercises that will deepen your understanding.
7) The author's has a hype-free, vendor-neutral writing style and is very experienced in his field.
It always is a good sign if as a reader I want more... so I would also have been interested in the author's view on the ongoing WS-*/SOAP vs. REST debate, and about adoption of the presented concepts and technologies in the industry (tools and project usage); for example, UDDI does not seem to have much traction these days. Maybe something for the Website accompanying the book, which will also have additional material for students and lecturers?
As a practicing IT architect, I have helped many companies to transform their existing applications into Web services-based SOAs. As a book author, I have captured my own experience with the technology in writing. As a researcher, I now investigate many of the architecture design issues the author points out. Still, I find this book to be very educational and informative; I highly recommend it for practitioners, students, and researchers that want to understand the big picture as well as technical rationale and details behind the various concepts and technologies. Those of you that believe some WSDL-to-Java wizards or RESTful POX/HTTP calls are all that is required for successful enterprise development and integration, please do have a look as well - you will begin to appreciate that there is more to the picture!

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The first textbook to focus on Web Services – the wave of the future for Web-based distributed computing.

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Java Soa Cookbook Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This book is intended for experienced Java developers and architects who need to know the details of SOA development with the Java programming language and associated technologies. It is not a very good big picture book on SOA. For that I recommend Service Oriented Architecture with Java: Using SOA and web services to build powerful Java applications, which was published in 2008, so it is still current in its approach.
To get the most out of this book the author assumes specifically that you are familiar with Java SE 5 or 6, servlets, JSP Enterprise Edition containers such as Glassfish, Enterprise JavaBeans, as well as JDBC, JNDI, EARs and WARs, and XML. In short, the author assumes that you have been involved in enterprise development using the Java technologies and APIs mentioned. If you have used web services but not recently, this book does help you get your feet back in the water. It is those that are complete novices that will get truly lost.
Parts of the book address strategy, design, and patterns, but largely it is a book that stays at a low level. A really good book on SOA design patterns is SOA Design Patterns (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl). The author also talks about SOA and Ruby, Python, and .NET. However, it is not necessary to have a background in these languages since Java is specifically the language and environment that the author addresses.
Currently, the table of contents is not included in the product description, so I include that next:
Part 1: SOA Fundamentals
Chapter 1. Introduction to SOA
Chapter 2. XML Schema and the SOA Data Model
Chapter 3. Working with XML and Java
Part 2: Web Services
Chapter 4. Getting Started
Chapter 5. Web Services with SAAJ
Chapter 6. Creating Web Service Applications with JAX-WS
Chapter 7. Providing SOAP-Based Web Services
Chapter 8. RESTful Web Services
Part 3: Business Processes
Chapter 9. Service Orchestrations with BPEL
Chapter 10. Advanced Orchestrations with BPEL
Chapter 11. SOA Governance
Part 4: Interoperability and Quality of Service
Chapter 12. Web Service Interoperability
Chapter 13. Quality of Service
Chapter 14. Enterprise Service Bus
I would say that between this book and the other two that I mentioned, you should have a pretty good starting point on SOA/Java reading material.

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Java SOA Cookbook offers practical solutions and advice to programmers charged with implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in their organization. Instead of providing another conceptual, high-level view of SOA, this cookbook shows you how to make SOA work. It's full of Java and XML code you can insert directly into your applications and recipes you can apply right away. The book focuses primarily on the use of free and open source Java Web Services technologies -- including Java SE 6 and Java EE 5 tools -- but you'll find tips for using commercially available tools as well.Java SOA Cookbook will help you:



Construct XML vocabularies and data models appropriate to SOA applications
Build real-world web services using the latest Java standards, including JAX-WS 2.1 and JAX-RS 1.0 for RESTful web services
Integrate applications from popular service providers using SOAP, POX, and Atom
Create service orchestrations with complete coverage of the WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) 2.0 standard
Improve the reliability of SOAP-based services with specifications such as WS-Reliable Messaging
Deal with governance, interoperability, and quality-of-service issues

The recipes in Java SOA Cookbook will equip you with the knowledge you need to approach SOA as an integration challenge, not an obstacle.

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