Audience

This book is written for developers who are new to web services. It aims to to provide you with a "big-picture" perspective to enable you to understand the scope and extent of web services, while also providing you with enough nuts and bolts and sample code to start writing your own services.

When choosing between a proprietary system and an open source implementation, we tend to favor open source implementations. When choosing among programming languages, we tend to favor Java. To make the most of the book, you should therefore have solid Java programming experience. If you need to brush up on Java, consider these books: