Preface

How to Use This Book

This book builds on itself as you move forward. This first section covers the basics of the underlying standards that make Web Services work. If you have a basic or general understanding of these standards, you may wish to move on to the second and third sections and refer back to these introductory chapters as needed.

Many of the examples in the text are fairly self-contained so that if you need a quick reference on how to create a particular Web Service consumer or service you can find it quickly. As the book examines the different technologies, each chapter contains examples that are similar so there is an easy cross-reference.

The book assumes that you have some understanding of how to compile Java and C# programs. The examples in each chapter do explain where to put certain files and how to set environmental settings, but you may want to have introductory texts lying around so you have a quick reference to items such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or the Common Language Runtime (CLR).