Rating:  - Excellent for newcomers or experienced WCF developers
This book's very well written and does a great job of explaining a lot of the features around WCF. I like their approach to topics, starting out with basics and evolving from there. For example, right off the bat they do a solid job of showing a service hosted entirely in code, then do a comparable service hosted in IIS. All differences are clearly laid out with some good rationale for either implementation.
This same approach continues through the book, which is something I'm always appreciative about: give me options with clear explanations of why they'd apply, then let me choose which one fits for my environment. The authors even lay out a number of tables throughout the book showing options and alternatives - like the supported features of bindings table in chapter 4.
It's a solid book for newcomers to WCF or experienced folks looking to brush up on the deltas as WCF moves to .NET 3.5.
Rating:  - Simply the best
I already own a couple of books on WCF - but none of them seemed to cover important (and advanced) topics such as serializers and bindings in-depth. But this book does, and it does it in a way that is both thorough and smart.
Sometimes it can be hard to make the right choice of components, but luckily, this book comes with a lot of useful and great comparison matrix' on different subject, which makes decisioning really easy.
All in all, this is one of the best book on WCF, but for me, this stands out to be the best. Highly recommended.
Rating: - Very good and valuable resource
The book covers all aspects of WCF in a clear and concise way. Even for people with a lot of experience or architectects who want to get an overview of WCF this is a real valuable resource.
It has a nice writing style so you can even enjoy it a bit later or with a glass of wine...
Rating: - Best overview of the Windows Communication Foundation I've seen
This is the best overview I have seen of the Windows Communication Foundation API. Particularly valuable is the discussion of the API's support for Web services that follow REST (Representation State Transfer) conventions. It would have been nice to have provided a clearer roadmap of where the technology is going, particularly its planned integration into BizTalk Server via Microsoft's Oslo project. But this looks like a very valuable book for developers trying to get work done now.
Rob Helm, Directions on Microsoft
Rating: - I expected a lot and it delivered
I'm a big fan of the entire "Essential" series from Addison-Wesley and I expected a lot from this book. I could sum up my opinion on it by saying "It delivers".
My vantage point is a little different from most in that I was coauthor of a book on Winfx/Indigo and I teach WCF. The pool of books out there on WCF are all quite good when compared to other technologies. I think that's b/c in large part, enterprise technologies aren't usually used by beginners and there's been a general reluctance to embrace WCF from what I've seen. I suspect this is in large part b/c you have to relearn Remoting/WS/WSE/MSMQ/Enterprise Services. Once you dive into it though, you quickly realize that WCF is almost too good to be true.
This book does a few things very well. First off, it explains each of the concepts clearly. I find that the authors all write well and are very good at succinctly communicating whatever they are talking about without ever talking over your head. The level of detail is very good too. A few places they could have went deeper (for instance, I think MTOM should have gotten more than a brief descriptive few sentences) but on the whole, I think the covered topics in proportion with how much they are used in the marketplace. They use a good bit of both simple and more involved expamples so if this was your first WCF book, you'd be well served but if you've read several WCF books, you'd still be glad you bought the book. I've bought both the print version and the Kindle version (which I love) and don't believe I've come across any errors. As such, I'd have to say the editing is very good, although that's not surprising in the least from this series. Another nice feature of the book is that while it has three authors, the writing style if very similar. So you get the benefit of three different people's experience without having the problems related to three different writing styles.
I found this book to be very helpful overall and even though I was well versed in most of the stuff they cover, I still found it a great reference. I've purchased copies of it for everyone on my staff and that's perhaps the highest compliment I could pay it - in addition to buying both the hard cover and Kindle version. I suspect if you buy it, you'll be glad you did.
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