This book is a WINNER -- I recommend it to ANYONE who sets foot onstage, or who has ever simply thought "How is British theater/TV so different from American?". While Mr Barkworth's writing style can sometimes be a little precious, the technical ideas he offers are invaluable. His thoroughly British, technical approach to stagecraft offers many wonderful practical tips and tools to help bring a performance to life. Mr Barkworth's years as a teacher at RADA are evident in his ability to concisely hit on some of the most commonly encountered stage situations, and he suggests wonderfully practical ways of preparing yourself, improving your performance, and coping with the inevitable problems faced onstage.

To help demonstrate some of his points, Mr Barkworth also offers both amusing and helpful anecdotes from his own experience, as well as some of his stage colleagues, including stalwarts such as Dames Wendy Hiller and Edith Evans.

The book is a glimpse into the world of the 20th Century London West End and a fascinating slice of history as well as a helpful technical guide. Highly recommended.

This book may seem very disperse in terms of the topics covered regarding Web Services, but I found that to be valuable given that it does not provide the typical basic examples. Having said that I believe this is a good book for intermediate and advanced .NET developers with already proficient on Web Services.

These are some comments regarding specific sections of the book:
* A third of the book is spent explainning web service basics, SOAP, WSDL and XML schema which is something not very valuable for proficient web service developers, but good for beginners.
* I found the chapter and samples on XML Serialization good to understand the custom XML serialization mechanisms available in .NET.
* The .NET remoting chapter is a good introduction to Remoting, though I haven't run the sample code.
* The UDDI chapter provides sample code on how to use the MS UDDI SDK to work with tModel documents. This is the first .NET web services book I read that actualy shows how to access UDDI programatically.
* The chapter on security has a good overview of security mechanisms available for Web Services, but has poor examples (WS-Security is only covered in words, as it wasn't supported when the book was published).
* Other valuable info: table of mapping between XSD and .NET types; examples on how to use SOAP headers.

not many example programs, it's more of a general information book on web services and what's available with dotnet.

It covers a lot of ground and seemed like a lot of subjects covered in 1 chapter could have entire books written about them.

I did notice a few of errors in the example code snippits and examples but nothing major.

Recommended

Web services in simple words write software as a service. This book starts with what is XML webservice and why we need it. And then how to create a web servies, how to consume it. Second chapter has two very simple easy to understand examples. Remoting and security are the best topics in this book. This book also explains SOAP, WSDL, UDDI (protocols for the web services). PS: This book expects readers to know C#. All the examples are in C#.
Dislikes: No word about caching. Too expensive. Title should say using C#.