This suspenseful story of three surgeons captured my interest from the first page. These three men that held lives in their hands, not only of their patients, also were threatened in their own livelyhood.

Dr. Carrington whose uncompromising work ethic drives away the woman he loves; Dr. Savage, brilliant GYN doctor with the morals of a "savage" alley cat and Dr. Merrick, Chief of Surgery, has a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do behavior problem.

The story blends the secret lives of these three men into an intriguing drama of love, lust and revenge. Written in the '70's and still a dramatic presentation.

This book covers the basics and fundamentals of Web services security and industry specs to an extent and quite good.

This book promotes Quadrasis EASI security kit (like a UserGuide) which made me so annoying! It does not provide practical examples from industry leading security vendors like Netegity TransactionMinder, SunONE Identity server etc.

If you are looking for implementing XML Security using Netegrity TransactionMinder, Microsoft Passport, SunONE Identity server..then this book is a WRONG CHOICE. You may find this book more appropriate if you are a Quadrasis user.

The book does a great job explaining how to build non-trivial WS systems that are secure from end to end. Instead of limiting the material to descriptions of SOAP-related technologies and their security (this is what the other books I've read on WS security do), the authors first explain how to secure quickly a simple homogenous (M$-based) WS application, then point out the problems with such a simple-minded approach, and then devote the rest of the book to the question of securing complex heterogeneous WS applications by putting all necessary pieces together.

The first part also has a good introduction into the building blocks for WS security solutions, including not only SOAP and XML security, but also security of the underlying middleware technologies. Here, they could do a better job on going into more details about WS-Security spec and its friends. In the second part, they show how to use those building blocks together. Again, chapters on security of Java-based WS and the security interoperability lack a good structure and some times are just confusing.

From reading the book, it became clear to me that WS security is yet another instance of the old problem of enterprise security integration, although with a SOAP twist. Therefore, many methods from middleware security can be used for securing WS applications. I would recommend reading this book only to those who build complex heterogeneous WS applications.

Mastering Web Services Security provides a valuable enterprise perspective on building secure Web Services applications. Rather than focusing on a single technology like .NET or Java, the book provides useful real-world guidelines for building Web Service based systems that use many different products.

Some previous reviews of this book thought that EASI was exclusively a description of the product from the authors' company. I didn't see it that way -- in fact, I didn't see any specific details describing vendor products based on EASI. I viewed EASI more as an architectural technique that can be applied to many vendor products. Different Web Services vendors of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) offer frameworks that look like EASI, which makes this book useful when evaluating those alternatives.