Book Review: Professional BizTalk Server 2006

This is another great book from Wrox. They provided the book free to me in exchange for a (hopefully unbiased) review through the MVP program. The title is "Professional BizTalk Server 2006", and was written by Darren Jefford, Kevin B. Smith, Ewan Fairweather. You might recognize Kevin's name as the creator of BizUnit. I have never met any of the authors, but they have great reputations in our niche, and, based on the contents of this book, really know what they are talking about.

Let me start by saying there are many good books on BizTalk on the market now. I am really pleasantly surprised by this, as BTS 2004 only had a few books available.

This books suffers from a confusing title. If you scroll back in history, Apress has a book on BTS called "Pro BizTalk 2006", which is very similar to this book's title.

I think these two books actually make a good pair. The Apress book is great for people who just went to training, and are diving in, and are trying to learn the basics. Don't let this fool you, in BizTalk the basics are complex. The Wrox book then picks up from there goes REAL deep into the details.

The book is well structured, and grabs you from the start; well, if you are anything like me anyway. I loved how the overview chapter in the beginning does a SQL trace on how the message agent in the host instance commits a message into the mbox. When I hit that part, I really knew this book was for me.

There are a lot of internal details of BTS that a good architect and developer don't even need to know about to do their jobs well. But if you want to get to that next level, or just truly grok how this engine works, you need to know the details.

The book finishes out with some great chapters on testing and performance tuning of BizTalk.

This is definitely a must read for anyone who wants to know what goes on under the hood. Get this book, unless you are new to BTS. In that case, buy the Apress book first.

Comments

Unknown said…
Brian: Glad to see you liked the book and glad that you are making use of the Wrox MVP book review program. Thanks!
10/01/2007 01:15:00 PM
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