Go Buy The Book “Professional BizTalk Server 2006”

I recently purchased a copy of Darren Jefford’s new Professional BizTalk Server 2006 book and am quite pleased with the material.

I had the pleasure of checking this book out during its construction, and must admit, my first thought during that review was “wow, this is great … but it seems to be a bit of a brain dump.” It seemed like lots of great topics and points, but I didn’t grasp the continuity (probably because I was skipping through chapters, and, reading them out of order). Now that I’m holding the printed copy, I am REALLY impressed with the organization and content. I love the other BizTalk 2006 books out there, but this is now my favorite. I just bought an armful of copies for my team.

So what’s good about it? My favorite things were:

• Most thorough investigation of adapters and specific adapter settings and properties that I’ve seen
• Excellent content on BAM that provided me with a few “lightbulb” moments
• The most printed material in existence on the Business Rules Engine
• Outstanding perspectives and details on testing (unit/integration/perf , etc) and tools
• Strong details on performance tuning (complimentary to the Pro BizTalk 2006 material), and low-latency tuning
• Sufficient depth on BizTalk Administration, still the most criminally under-documented part of the BizTalk lifecycle

Great stuff. Darren (and Kevin and Ewan) should be very proud of this effort. This book is simply required reading for any BizTalk architect.

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