I am working through the Hansen book currently. I'm not strictly a newbie, having some background with RESTful web services and some SOAP work, but near enough I find.
The Hansen book is a very dense read, but by pulling up the code in eclipse and reading and re-reading the text I find I am learning quite a bit.
The problem for newbies is learning enough about SOA to actually be useful. Most *basic* Web Services books are simply not enough in my experience to get you to tht level. If you want simple I recommend sticking with REST. For SOA you have to make a commitment of time.
This is where the Hansen book comes in. Once you are aware of a couple fixes which need to be made, Hansen's examples run well. He takes you though an exhausting list of alternatives and explains what is better and what is worse. Don't just grab an example and assume it's best-practice because sometimes he develops an working example which is pretty grim, then in the next section shows how to make it better.
That said, I've found this book to be exactly what I need to take my skills to the next level. Hansen shows Lot's of ways of doing things. His examples aren't toy examples, they accurately describe the challenges of real-world system integration work, and give you multiple tools to solve those challenges. It's a difficult book but a great one in that respect.
There were a couple of problems with the examples (at least on Windoze) which you need to get past. A recurring
maven problem is a POM validation error, maven 2 objects to relative paths names. This pretty much has to be fixed for every example.
< !-- systemPath>${glassfish.home}/lib/javaee.jar</systemPath -->
<systemPath>C:/Sun/SDK/lib/javaee.jar</systemPath>
The other problem is a missing environment variable which needs to be set to point to the maven 2 home directory. This is named M2_HOME in the build files.
