Packt’s new Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook by Ahmed Aboulnaga and Arun Pareek is packed full of essential information for the Oracle SOA administrator, in fact I would go so far as to say that it should be required reading for administrators who are new the the Oracle SOA Suite platform.  I think that reading it would greatly shorten the learning curve and help new administrators avoid many common problems or points of confusion.

More so than any other single piece of content that I have seen on the topic, it provides the information that a SOA administrator needs to know in order to successfully configure, manage, monitor, troubleshoot and backup an Oracle SOA environment.

It is clear and to the point, it presents just the information that you need, and the information is easy to find.  It is not cluttered up with a whole bunch of extra information you don’t need.  It is detailed and technical – providing information that you can use.  I think the book is not only a great introduction for a new administrator who needs to get a feel for Oracle SOA Suite, but it is also a great reference volume to keep on hand, even for experienced administrators.

It is obvious when reading the book that the authors have extensive experience and that they know what is important to their audience.  I have been working with Oracle SOA Suite for several years now, since 10g days, and I am one of the authors of the official Oracle SOA Suite Certification question base, and even I learned things from this book that I did not know.

The book covers topics like managing the SOA infrastructure, managing composite applications, monitoring SOA Suite, tuning, configuration and administration, troubleshooting, security policies, managing MDS and the dehydrations store and backup and recovery.

The bonus online chapter covers important issues like patching, upgrading from 10g, cluster configuration and silent (scripted) installation.

I for one will be keeping this book on my book shelf and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in or working with Oracle SOA Suite, in an administration capacity, or who just wants to know more about the product in general.