I've had the pleasure to review O'Reilly's "Real World Web Services" by Will Iverson. Basically, I've found the book to be an excellent starting point for developers in need of very concrete and working stuff about web services. Definitely not yet another reference book on SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.

My 9-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

You would like to concretely jump into the web services movement but all you can find are the same old books with invariably repetitive and boring toy examples, such as the infamous StockQuote and Wheater web services. Don’t look any further and grab yourself a copy of this book. Will Iverson takes a significantly different approach and shows you how to build concrete web services applications by leveraging existing web services APIs provided by important industry actors, such as, Amazon, Google, eBay, Gracenote (CDDB), FedEx, PayPal, Interfax, etc.

What’s more, the author does not limit himself to presenting dry facts about how to work with those web services. Instead, he elegantly demonstrates how to compose them in order to create competitive analysis, list auctions and estimate shipping costs, integrate billing with faxing technologies, syndicate searches, aggregate news from different sources using Quartz and RSS, build a custom CD catalog, dig out and deliver hot news, automatically create daily discussions on Blogger and LiveJournal, and much more.

Basically, this book provides exactly what is often missing from other tomes while managing at the same time to stay extremely simple and straightforward, yet very complete and accurate. I would definitely advise it to any Java developer who is eager to start writing effective and working web services code.