Chapter 5 talks about the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit. It's the less useful for me, but maybe for those wanting to publish COM components as Web Services this chapter is a must.

In chapter 6 the author explains you the basics of creating web services with .NET and the advantages of creating them with ASP.NET. Useful topics such as data caching, distributed transactions, namespaces and parameter encoding are covered in a very straight-to-the-point manner. I loved this chapter, in spite that it's not very long. Chapter 7 follows, explaining how to use SOAP headers in your web service and your clients. There you'll learn how to easily extend your web service's calls with custom SOAP headers -which can be used to pass custom information between the client and the server. Very useful examples in VB.NET.

In chapter 8 the author explains how to implement interfaces in web services -even, how to implement more than one interface by a single web service. I've found this chapter to be a very interesting one, since I come from the COM world and I really wanted this feature of implementing multiple interfaces to be available in web services. I didn't know I could do this -although I had already tried to "patch" it with my own implementation.

Chapter 9 is worth the price of the entire book. After all, it talks about the main application of web services in practice: passing data between the client and the server. It explains how to pass DataSets, XML documents and object arrays, among other things.

In chapter 10 SOAP extensions are covered in depth. Authorization using SOAP extensions is explained there. This is a VERY useful chapter. On the other hand, chapter 11 covers UDDI. Great chapters, both of them! From chapter 11 I liked the topic "Publishing Your Web Services with UDDI" a lot.

Chapter 12 goes into some details about interoperating with other SOAP toolkits, including some issues you may find. If you intend to make a web service written in .NET easily callable from any client (Java client, or whatever), this chapter is a must.

Chapter 13 explains the steps for creating a web service, from design to implementation issues. It's a tad short, in my opinion. For example, topics such as Usage Accounting are barely covered.

Appenix B adds some useful information, including tips and tricks for .NET developers, and traps you should avoid when developing a web service.

The entire book is a must-have in your developer's bookshelf. It touches everything respect to web services, and I guess that this will be my preferred book on the topic for long time. Five stars, yes!