On the bright side, the text is very well written with so few spelling errors. Its tutorial form guides the reader smoothly, one step at a time. The majority of the chapters are short and concrete, the text is easy to understand and to follow, most of the times. It surely serves the reader well, as a hands on introduction, without getting deep into details. Its source code works!
On the dark side, the installation chapter, 4, needs some additions, clarifications and updates, since the newer versions always need patching and so on. The download links from o.t.n. also need an update. An inexperienced reader might spend a considerable amount of time and effort to get the SOA suite servers up and running. These two links could offer some significant help: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=4210625� and http://www.packtpub.com/article/installation-configuration-oracle-soa-suite-11g-1
All in all, the book offers a clear introduction in SOA and is recommended as a primer for newcomers to the SOA 11g world. An experienced soa 11g user might consider the book superficial, as no mention is made of advanced subjects, such as creating XML schema and reusing it.
