This book is a very useful "how-to" for creating web services. If you happen to be using Axis2 and, even better, Eclipse, then the many examples are even more valuable. And if your services need to be secure or asynchronous or have attachments, you get good step-by-step explanations, too.

This was my first major web services project and we needed to use a range of security features for it. This book helped me get up to speed much faster than I would have without it - there's a lot to learn to get your first production web service going: WSDL, object models, WS-Security, public key infrastructure, etc. This book walks you through all of in a way that gives you a reasonable change of getting your own service working. And there are techniques for helping you figure out what the problem is if you can't get it working.

I purchased the pre-publication PDF and there were some parts that could have used better editing.

More presentation on how Axis2 works behind the scenes would have been nice, but there is still lots of good practical material here.