My personal review of BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook

There are many great reviews about this book made by well-respected members of BizTalk Community like Nino Crudele, Kent Weare, Lex Hegt, Tord Glad Nordahl, Saravana Kumar, Mikael Sand, Naushad Alam, Rohit Sharma, Howard S. Edidin and much more.

If you have been reading my blog you already know that I had the honor to be part of this project as one of the official technical reviewers of the book along with Abdul Rafay, Randal van Splunteren, and Rene Brauwers.

So everything I can say maybe can be suspect… but I will be impartial in my personal review of the book, share some moments of this first experience as a technical reviewer and reference key aspect of other reviews.

For whom is this book?

First of all this book is not intended to explain the basics of this technology: What is and how to create schemas, maps or how to use and create orchestrations and so on. I honestly believe that this book is not intended for people who are taking the first steps in this technology (for that purpose there are many other books on the market)… but also the reader will not necessarily have to be an expert, just have very basic knowledge.

The book focuses on different topics including:

• Chapter 1: Setting up a BizTalk Server Environment
• Chapter 2: BizTalk Server Automation: Patterns
• Chapter 3: BizTalk Server Instrumentation, Error Handling, and Deployment
• Chapter 4: Securing your Message Exchange
• Chapter 5: WCF Messaging with BizTalk
• Chapter 6: BizTalk AppFabric Connect
• Chapter 7: Monitoring and Maintenance
• Chapter 8: Applying Rules
• Chapter 9: Testing BizTalk Artifacts

in 50+ very practical and easy to follow recipes based upon a lot of real-world experience which ensures this book a very broad audience like Lex Hegt mentions in his review:

“Although this book is primarily written for BizTalk developers and administrators, also system engineers, infrastructure architects, solution architects, and database administrators will find subjects of their interest in this book.”

Who is Steef-Jan Wiggers?

Well, I believe that it was unnecessary to present it but… Steef-Jan Wiggers is one of the most respected members of the BizTalk Server community for his countless contributions and awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 2010.

Personally, I have to say that Steef-Jan has done a well written and wonderful book! Steef-Jan has a lot of BizTalk experience which greatly facilitated the technical reviewer’s life

What the community says about this book?

Saravana Kumar says: “You are never going to sit and read all the recipes in one night, you are going to keep the book as a reference and follow the recipe you fancy.”

Kent Weare says: “So, based upon these areas of discussion it is impossible to go into a tremendous amount of depth on each topic.  However, Steef-Jan will provide a practical example and then leave the reader with links to valuable resources where you can dive deeper if you wish.”

Tord Nordahl says: “One of the things I find amazing about this book is that the target audience is not only developers, but architects, administrators, and people not working that much with BizTalk but want to have a good reference”

Nino Crudele says: “This book distinguishes itself from the others, for one thing, this book is not a simple manual, this book doesn’t respond to the question “how to do” but at the question “the best way to do”.”

What I say about this book (or my conclusion)?

As a technical reviewer, I had the opportunity to read the “draft”, but once I ended up… I was curious to see and read the final result.

Unlike my crazy Italian BizTalk MVP fellow Nino Crudele, reading while driving and at the same time taking photos, I had the opportunity to read the book quietly in the comfort of my couch and the result, as I suspected, was a good time spent reading a great and very practical and well-organized book (Subject/problem; Getting ready; How to do it; How it works; There’s more; See also) with plenty of real-world problems and solutions.

This is a very useful and highly recommended book that must be shared by your entire BizTalk team.

Congratulations Steef for this excellent book!

Where you can order the book?

You can order the book and find the complete table of contents on Packt Website or on Amazon.