Thanks for posting this -- I had been meaning to post my review, as well, though I wasn't nearly as enamoured of the book as you were. I've attached my review as plaintext below, but the gist is: "not worth the $10, unless you're too pressed on time to spend an hour or so Googling for the same information."
-Lennon
Review of "Web Services With Ruby on Rails" by Lennon Day-Reynolds ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Generally, I found the information in this eBook to be interesting, if not much more helpful than what is already available from online sources for free. I also found myself regularly annoyed by the author's writing style and apparent lack of truly deep understanding of the subject matter; many of his minor mistakes and ommissions bespeak a superficial grasp of Ruby and web services architectures, or at least an unwillingness to risk confusing readers with any "hard" technical content. Off the bat, I was frustrated with the lack of pointers to outside resources, including the specifications defining XML-RPC and SOAP, as well as the all-too- common confusion of Rails concepts with the underlying Ruby libraries and syntax. (More minor nits included the author's continuous referrals to the 'NET' library, rather than 'Net::HTTP' -- not a huge issue on its own, but at the very least a editing blunder.) He's also just plain wrong about much of his background explanation: as an example, he claims that "SOAP grew out of XML-RPC," which is somewhat analagous to saying that "Ruby grew out of Smalltalk": yes, one influenced the other, but it was hardly a direct descendent. The communities that developed and promoted the two architectures had few members in common, and the scope and requirements defined for them have even less overlap. The code examples are useful, but could benefit from some typographical improvements. Specifically, the lack of line numbers in the longer examples (such as the API server implementation) made following the several pages of explanation of them unneccessarily difficult. Basically, this so-called 'eBook' reminded me more of a standard 'HOWTO' guide: a simple, "gloss-over-the-hard-bits" introduction to a narrow subject. Unlike most HOWTO documents, however, the loose structure and lack of clear commenting or literate explanation of code sections made the non-trivial examples difficult to follow. It may sound as though I'm attacking the book on the basis of fairly inconsequential details, but given the cost ($10 for PDF-only distribution) and general reputation of O'Reilly for high-quality publishing, I think the lack of useful bibiographic information and professional layout warrant some complaint.
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