Applied SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture and Design Strategies Review

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(More customer reviews)I found this book valuable for providing a solid approach to designing service oriented architectures. It is important for people to understand that this book does not focus on implementing web services - there are plenty of other books that do that. This book focuses on the hard parts - how to design an architecture around the concept of services.
This book is also not a "cookbook" - it does not offer easy answers to these tough problems. Instead it walks you through the thought process so you can learn how to come up with the right answers yourself.
I am actively using this book to help my customers get started with SOA and to help them avoid common design pitfalls. My favorite chapter is Chapter 9: Using Services to Build Enterprise Solutions. The distinction between today's monolothic applications and tomorrow's composite applications requires a paradigm shift that the authors express well.
Finally, I especially liked the practical approach, practical steps and practical advice continually peppered throughout the entire book.

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Endorsed by all major vendors (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and SAP), SOA has quickly become the industry standard for building next-generation software; this practical guide shows readers how to achieve the many benefits of SOA
Begins with a look at the architectural principles needed to create successful applications and then goes on to examine the process for designing services and SOA implementations
Each stage of the design process has an accompanying chapter that walks readers through the details and provides helpful tips, techniques, and examples
The author team of SOA practitioners also provides two unique, comprehensive, end-to-end case studies illustrating the architectural and design techniques presented in the book

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A Guide to Appraisal Valuation Modeling Review

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(More customer reviews)Given its monetary importance, it is not at all surprising that real estate valuation would be one of the first activities to be automated. Even though the concepts needed were in place long before the first AVM tools make their way on the market, the technology and data was not available. The Internet explosion changed all that, and now the enormity of the available real estate information actually dictates that automated valuation be performed. The use of AVMs has made appraisals dramatically less expensive, and most importantly, has lowered the incidence of fraud by removing the human element and the consequent temptation to inflate housing prices. And even more importantly, the declining real estate market at the present time and the accompanying aversion towards risk by lending institutions has resulted in the development and use of many different types of AVM tools, and vendors of these tools are working diligently to improve and market them.
Appraisal valuation modeling, the subject of this very short book, can be considered to be a branch of the field of spatial econometrics. The content of the book however is quite elementary, and no sophisticated mathematics is used. Many AVM tools make heavy use of concepts from artificial intelligence and mathematical statistics, but the authors have chosen to write a book that will be helpful to the mortgage underwriter/risk manager, and so the book is not directed towards developers or modelers. The book addresses several questions important to these types of readers: 1. How can appraisers decide which type of analysis to use and how can one AVM tool be distinguished from another? 2. What is the difference between `mass' and `single-property' appraisals? 3. What is the difference between `cost', `sales comparison', and `income capitalization' approaches to valuation? 4. What are the advantages and disadvantages in using `adjustable' versus `fixed' AVM tools? 5. Is an AVM tool that is dependent on dozens of different variables always better than one that is based only on a few? 6. When can a valuation model be considered to be "good"? 7. How do you incorporate "subjective" property characteristics in a valuation model?


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A Guide to Appraisal Valuation Modeling will introduce skeptics to the mathematical modeling of market behavior. The handbook covers fundamental statistics and the basics of regression analysis and model construction. Many of these topics are brought together in a case study on the valuation of lots in an actual residential subdivision.

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