SOA in Practice; The Art of Distributed System Design, by Nicolai Josuttis and published by O'Reilly, is a very pragmatic approach explaining how Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can simplify the creation of large-scale applications. It is a thoughtful work with deep insights based on hands-on experiences. This book transforms the years of vision, bringing it down to earth by describing the real-world problems of implementing and running a SOA in practice. Covering varied types of projects like a large set of web service based components or connecting legacy applications to more modern workflows, this book clarifies how and whether SOA fits your needs. SOA is finally becoming a concrete discipline and reading this book one can get a real understanding of what SOA is all about by having a fundamental overview and then how to realize it in practice. Starting from the many facets of SOA it examines the typical use patterns and vividly explores how loose coupling helps build stronger applications. The chapter on Loose Coupling goes on to describe various forms of tight and loose coupling and some of the challenges and benefits of each of them clearly emphasizing that loose coupling increases complexity and therefore carries cost implications. The role of Infrastructure in allowing the use of services in a productive system paving the way for high interoperability in SOA landscape has been very nicely explained in the chapter Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). A clear-cut framework, which has been described, helps in determining when to take advantage of SOA. It helps to: focus squarely on real deployment and technology, not just standards maps; examine business problems to determine which ones fit an SOA approach before plastering an SOA solution on top of them; get concrete paths for building solutions without getting trapped in the mire of changing web services details; and gain the experience of a specialist intimately involved with SOA. The book categorically describes the real-world problems of implementing and running an SOA in practice. The categorization of different layers of SOA and different SOA stages of extension has also been very nicely covered. The influence of performance, security, and other real- life aspects on the business case of SOA and the way a SOA is realized has been very aptly described. The book categorizes SOA as a strategy which includes both technical and organizational aspects. Technically, the chapter on ESB (infrastructure) explains on how it provides interoperability and organizationally, the chapter on “Business Process Management” covers appropriate processes so that it is clear how to design new solutions and identify new services, chapter on “Service Lifecycle” covers the life of different pieces of software and the chapter “Model-Driven Service Development” covers the corresponding software development processes (e.g., model-driven development) and appropriate organizational structures is covered in the chapter “SOA and the Organization”. Title- SOA in Practice Author - Nicolai Josuttis Publisher- O'Reilly