The book begins with the very basics (WCF Essentials) and soon takes a deep-dive into Service, Data and Operation contracts and other aspects of WCF, making it a useful for both novice and expert readers. The author gives a good number of intricate details about WCF.

I usually either just glance through or skip the appendix of many books that I've read - this one was an exception, read through all the appendices (WCF Coding Standard being a top-notch appendix).

This book will be one of those 'I will use this as a reference handbook' book. ( )

Boring and drags on. Topic material not nearly as interesting as I had hoped, but this is no doubt due in large part to the crappiness of WCF in general, and not this book. ( )

Not a good introductory book. This book has a lot of advanced material and is not an appropriate first book on WCF. It also suffers from some bad choices regarding what is inluded and formatting. As one example, every time an attribute is mentioned, the code for the attribute declaration is in the text. This gets in the way when you have to differentiate between the important code and the attribute declaration. It also needs better organization or formatting. The security chapter goes on for 104 pages and is divided into sections on different scenarios that are difficult to tell apart.

However, I expect to be coming back to this book when I need to understand how things really work in WCF and when I'm looking for more advanced information. It's a good book to have in your WCF library, but probably not the first one. ( )