New interesting book on WS-BPEL

I recently read a new Packt book titled "SOA and WS-BPEL: Composing Service-Oriented Solutions with PHP and ActiveBPEL" by Yuli Vasiliev. I've used ActiveBPEL in the past, and there certainly is a learning curve involved in learning BPEL. However, Yuli does an excellent job of explaining both the fundamentals of BPEL, and more advanced BPEL topics such as parallel vs. sequential processing. The use of a ongoing case study walks the user logically through the learning process.

The first section of the book, which I found particularly useful given my lack of PHP experience, primarily focuses on how to consume and build SOAP web services with PHP. Using PHP with SOAP doesn't seem as straightforward as it should be, but Yuli does a good job at describing the process and best practices. The remaining sections cover BPEL, and ActiveBPEL's implementation of them.

The book is fairly brief in size (280 pages), but covers a lot of material in an effective fashion. I would recommend it to anyone interested in using PHP with SOAP and/or ActiveBPEL (the BPEL portions are beneficial even if you are not a PHP developer).

jeff