If Marcel Proust, a famously meticulous & prolix author, were to write a computer book & then carefully remove all his erudition, colourful extended metaphors & aristocratic wit & replace them with some coloured diagrams & tables, then in my mind's eye, it would probably be a book not unlike this one. I found it difficult to get to the end of a paragraph without drifting off & thinking about something else (which didn't happen with Proust), let alone absorbing much of anything from the seemingly endless chapters. As an example of needless complexity, which I had been warned about after reading a previous book, this book has not been bettered in my experience, though the Concepts, Technology, and Design book by the same author comes close! The book discusses that apparently SOA services should be designed with eight fairly simple design principles in mind; principles which most software developers will be comfortable with. However this book takes over 500 pages to describe them and yet within all the waffle it does not even describe any practical instructions for how to apply them in the real world (because this forms another book) - though I did skip through the case studies so clues might have been there. Nevertheless I struggled through to the end, skipping various repetitive sections (& as mentioned the case studies), in the hope it would get better (it didn't) & again (as with the previous book) wondered who this is aimed at. Though I did realise why the unworkable nature of the SOA described within has lead to recent "SOA Is Dead" articles, because no company with a profit to make could contemplate such a lengthy & heavyweight, & apparently quite inflexible, process within a modern 'agile-centric' business.1/5.
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