Within a year or two of publication, I purchased the following two
textbooks on Web Services:

• E. Cerami, Web Services
  Essentials: Distributed Applications with XML-RPC, SOAP, UDDI &
  WSDL, O’Reilly & Associates, 304 pp., February 2002
• H. M. Deitel, P. J. Deitel, B. DuWaldt & L. K. Trees, Web
  Services: A Technical Introduction, Deitel & Associates, Inc., 494
  pp., August 2002

It’s now the end of 2006, and as far as I can determine, neither of
these books has been updated.

This seems odd. In the intervening four years:

• There have been no successors to these books

  There’s
  no shortage of books on Web Services. However, the more-recent
  offerings are more contextually focused – Ajax and Web Services,
  Java Web Services, .NET Web Services, etc.

• Web Services continues to gain adoption and continues to
  evolve

  In isolation, this is ample reason for a plethora of
  successors! (And, as I’ve written elsewhere (GRIDtoday
  article, blog
  posts), this adoption and evolution has been at the expense of
  Grid Computing.)

Even though I welcome the appearance of contextually focused books
on Web Services, and am delighted to see Web Services’ ongoing adoption and
evolution, I still believe there is a need for successors to Cerami’s
and Deitel et al.’s seminal textbooks.

Hopefully we won’t need to wait too long.