2008 Best Books Award Winner in the category Business: Computers/Technology/Internet - USA Book News.
Service Oriented Architecture is all the rage these days. Dozens, if not hundreds of books are published on it, and more seem to show up every day. This book isn't awash with buzzwords and jargon. In truth, this book will probably be shunned by the SOA eltie.
Rather than focus on the front end, this book focuses on the back end. That Heritage data silo/application where all of the other books just draw a box with "connect somehow" written on it. Most of them try to sell some expensive midleware along the way.
Management can and should read the first five chapters in the book. These chapters aren't technical and may very well open their eyes. The remaining chapters are for those programmers given the "connect somehow" task. While OpenVMS is the Heritage platform of choice in this book and Ubuntu is used for the front end development, developers from other platforms should get a lot of ideas by reading this book.