Hi, I did a bit of research on the topic, but haven't found the "it" book.
Do you have recommendations for books on developing web services? Ideally it explains from the beginning, thought process, development process, maintaining the service, tracking, optimization, and so on. Basically it would guide me through developing web services like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc.
Thanks, Amie
SOAP?, REST, which type of web service. When gigging into REST i found this from O'Reilly good and covered a lot of what you ask for
RESTful Web Services By: Leonard Richardson; Sam Ruby Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Pub. Date: May 8, 2007 Print ISBN-10: 0-596-52926-0 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-596-52926-0
And this on API's helped [api resources][1]
[1]: http://RESTful Web Services By: Leonard Richardson; Sam Ruby Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Pub. Date: May 8, 2007 Print ISBN-10: 0-596-52926-0 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-596-52926-0
There are multiple answers to your question, but you could help us by understanding the technologies you're working with.
Keep in mind that overall understanding of how web services function is important, but implementation is platform/environment dependent. Practical guidance is helpful, but in this space the devil is in the details.
Hope this helps!
Given your answer to PurplePilot, you might want to take a look at OpenRasta which is a well-coded, well-implemented REST-based framework and see how someone else has done it. The author has also written a number of articles about using it, starting with the introduction here.
I'd recommend to start with Python/Django (go through their online tutorial/book).
If .Net web services you could try Microsoft Press books or Self-Paced Training books.