The book is dated, and some of the examples, like the ones using Python are out of sync with current libraries. But, overall, the book is still valuable.It begins with a nice forward from an XML-RPC insider - Dave Winer;he was intimately involved in the evolution of the XML-RPC spec and you get a rare glimpse into the discussions that resulted in the technology spec - something that you rarely find in tech books. The next best thing about the book are the authors - they are totally in charge of the subject being developers themselves and experienced authors. With reasonable examples,tips and insights on XML-RPC - the technology itself, plus various language implementations of XML-RPC libraries, this book written on an under hyped and flawed,but successful loose integration and web services technology is a good read. Apart from sections explaining the protocol itself, the major portion of the book is devoted to Java,Perl, and Python implementations of the standard, integrating web applications with XML-rpc using PHP,and bridging ASP and COM.