Finally, because it seems to have taken the longest time since its merry band of authors (Judith Hurwitz, Carol Baroudi, Marcia Kaufmann and I) started hitting the keyboard, Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies is now available from Amazon. (If you are desperate to make an impulse purchase you can click this link). I must therefore presume that it is also now available in the book shops, but I've not visited one to find out.

It looks as though the book is likely to sell well, because of the success of the “mini book”. Wiley offers a corporate marketing service which allows companies to sponsor a condensed version of a Dummies book (roughly the first five chapters, with a little editing). The mini book bears their logo and the company can use it for marketing purposes.

So far Wiley has managed to sell over 30,000 of SOA for Dummies mini books (to IBM, Avaya and HP) which is better than most dummies books achieve. I guess the idea of having a simple explanation of SOA is attractive. We believed that would be the case when we took the idea to Wiley. But actually the idea we had was a little broader than that.

The truth is that few people make money from writing books and we didn't expect to even pay for our time. Only runaway best sellers generate large amounts of money. The idea was to use the minibook as a basis for launching in-house SOA education courses for companies in the US and Europe. The Dummies book was written to be the basis for such an education course. If you're interested in such a course, contact me by email, or buy the Dummies book and run your own.