On the bright side, the text is of average quality written in American English. It is well organized, full of helpful images though of the older JDeveloper 11.1.1.5 version, with minimal if any tutorials or hands on practice. The author explains clearly some points, such as the different kinds of BPEL processes, synchronous, asynchronous, one way or bilateral, especially in the early chapters.
On the dark side, the text is full of spelling errors, sentences without a verb, some answers to exams questions (options are A or B only, but the correct answer is given as C). Furthermore, there are technical errors spread everywhere; consider the example of what happens with already running instances when retiring or shutting down a composite application within the enterprise manager. I quote a sentence found in page 338: "29. b: Shutting down the composite will not terminate the running instance." No SOA suite setup instructions are given, nor is any source code or errata, available online.
All in all, the book offers a spherical but not hands on introduction to the SOA suite. It makes a fairly good certification primer. Nonetheless, whole topics such as complex event processing and many others are only mentioned in the exam questions, but not in the text itself. It seems the book was written in haste; some professional reviewing and correction of the text, would be more than desirable!
