Whatever your favourite programming language, Professional XML Web Services does a good job at explaining recent technologies and tools needed to understand and use Web services. Whether you are a developer or IT manager, this book's wide-ranging perspective on some late-breaking standards and tools will help you design and code the next generation of Web applications. The strong cross-language perspective is what distinguishes this title from the rest of the pack. The book tours actual tools for developing Web services in C++, Java, Perl, Python and Microsoft's new C# language (part of .NET). Short chapters survey what's out there for Web services developers with options from IBM, Sun, HP and Microsoft. If you are somehow convinced that one vendor has a head start with Web services, you'll think again after reading this volume. The heart of this text is its thorough and approachable tour of core standards needed for Web services, from the innards of SOAP for sending messages between systems over HTTP or other protocols, to WSDL for describing Web services and UDDI for looking them up at run-time. This book does a good job at fixing a very fast-moving target. (SOAP 1.1 is used here instead of the emerging 1.2 standard.) Besides the new .NET (and ADO.NET) on the Microsoft platform, there's also coverage of the vendors older SOAP Toolkit 2.0. Sections on using Perl and Python here will help bring fans of these popular Web development languages onboard with Web services. The authors conclude with two larger case studies, an interesting remote file system exposed through Web services using Java, plus an auction database done in the new C#. Anchoring the discussion in what are sure to be the two most popular choices for Web services development helps ensure this text has a practical focus, too. With its range of coverage of what Web services are and the actual standards and tools used to implement them, this title is a perfect choice for learning what all the fuss is about. It's all anyone needs to start designing and coding with Web services and using many of today's most popular programming languages and tools. --Richard Dragan