Book Advice

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am going to be working on a project soon that deals with xml web services. Having no current knowledge of xml,web services or soap I was hoping to get some advice on which text would be most beneficial.

The old project had me downloading straight text files every night and loading them to a local MySQL database...pretty easy. However, the new system will be using web services to provide me with the information of new/updated data, and I believe I am supposed to use SOAP to query out this information - this is actually more of a question as I don't neccessarily understand the relationships of these technologies yet.

I am, obviously, in a sad state and starting way behind the curve, so any recommendations would be appreciated.

Comment on Book Advice

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Re: Book Advice by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 06, 2004 at 06:35 UTC
samtregar wrote an Article on SOAP on http://perl.com, where he tells a cautonary tale when SOAP is not the solution. At the bottom of that article, there are many resource links to interesting pages - maybe these help you. Personally, I haven't done anything with either SOAP or the other Web Service stuff, which are all bad reincarnations of RPC over unprotected channels to me ;-) As an aside, you might want to choose your titles a bit more descriptive, like Book Advice on SOAP and Web Services for example.	[reply]
Re: Book Advice by davorg (Chancellor) on Oct 06, 2004 at 07:45 UTC
I'd guess that you'd find Programming Web Services with Perl to be pretty useful. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club." -- Chip Salzenberg	[reply]
Re: Book Advice by synistar (Pilgrim) on Oct 06, 2004 at 13:59 UTC
I actually got more out of working through example code than from any book on SOAP. The "Programming Web Services with Perl" book may be useful however (I didn't have that book when learning). I would start with the SOAP::Lite documentation and Cookbook here: http://guide.soaplite.com/ http://cookbook.soaplite.com/ Work your way through those simple examples. Getting them up and running will give you a good starting point for your own code.	[reply]