Who Should Read this Book?

We wrote this book for technical professionals and students. Although Chapter 2, "Background," briefly introduces the requisite background material about major XML technologies, we assume that you have a fair grasp of those technologies coming into this book. Developers who want to understand the overall Web services platform will appreciate this book. However, this is not a "developer book" in the sense of providing detailed, code-level understanding. That was not our objective. Architects, consultants, and technically oriented management should find this book useful. Students who have already attended introductory courses in distributed systems or database systems will be able to understand the Web services platform.