APress sent me a review copy of Paul A. Watters' "Web Services in Finance" which I was very eager to read. Sometimes the reality can be quite disappointing... Aside from the fact that the title is badly chosen, this was a good book overall.

My 6-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

Given that I'm currently working for a financial institution and that I have been developing web services solutions for a while now, I could only dream of ever seeing a book titled “Web Services in Finance”. When I picked it up, I was hoping to see web services technologies applied to real and concrete financial case studies. However, I must admit that the reality was quite different.

The book is very well written but its content has not much to do with what the title advertises. The book does not provide much information as to how to use web services for carrying out hardcore financial business. The author merely uses some financials terms here and there for explaining basic web services concepts and for showing some toy examples. He voluntarily stays at a very high level which completely defeats the intent behind the title he has chosen in my opinion.

Even though I expected something else, I still found this book to be a fun read. It can definitely be valuable for beginners in that it provides a very good introduction to the fundamental web services technologies, such as SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc, and it also goes into important topics like security and qualities of service. My biggest complaint is just that the box does not match the description that stands on it.