"Web services" is one of those tech buzzwords that bubbles up and takes hold. Sometimes those buzzwords fade and never fulfill their promise (Remember all that talk about "push technology" in the late 90's?). Web services, however, seems to be fulfilling its promise.
Users of Web encounter web services all the time, although they may not know it. But it's web services that allow the links to Amazon.com to show up, and get automatically updated, on this page. It's a web service that allows a website to automatically display the weather forecast as served up by some other site, or Google Adwords. And it's a web service that allows RSS headlines to get displayed automatically on a page.
If you are a webmaster, and you've been wondering how to implement advanced web services on your site, Real World Web Services by Will Iverson may just be the place to start. This book focuses on "using existing web services in productive and useful ways." This isn't a Dummies book -- it's from O'Reilly which means its for the professional webmaster who knows something more about programming than using a Front Page bot. Most of the programming in the book is Java, although Java isn't the only way to go about web services.
