I imagine you picked up this book for a reason.
Perhaps you've built a fantastic website for your organization, but now that it's done, you want more: more ways to view the information, more ways to alter the information, more ways to share the information. Web services can help.
Maybe you run a small business through eBay and want better ways to manage the items you are selling. Web services can help.
You could be a student, a teacher, or an institution wanting to leverage the vast wealth of information compiled by Google. Web services can help.
Web services can help you use the information on the Web in new ways, from simply allowing someone to subscribe to pockets of information so that they can be immediately notified when new information is available, to creating complex business applications that can manage complex real-time supply chains.
Before digging in to how to use web services in the following chapters, this chapter presents you with the following:
What web services are
Why web services are used
How web services work
Who uses web services
And finally, why you should use web services