Rating: 

I was looking to this book as a good tutorial to help me set up my environment for a university project; the class is "Distributed Computing" and we are to dynamically discover services. This book gave me a starting point, but I still needed to research some technologies on my own to see what was the easiest and quickest to set up.

The most useful chapter to me was the overview on UDDI. It is extremely detailed and provides 3 different code examples, each using a different API. Once you read this chapter, you will have a thorough understanding of UDDI, which is the basis for many APIs available.

In conclusion, a good book to introduce you to the concepts of Web Services, but not the best for a student who wants to get web services up and running as quickly as possible.