As promised, this book gives the reader a quick and dirty introduction to developing web services and clients in Java, specifically web services using the JAX-WS API. It's an especially good choice at the moment since, as best I can tell, there aren't a lot of other current books on the subject.
If there was any question, this is not a book for beginning programmers; you're expected to have a pretty solid understanding of Java development, although you certainly don't need to have an "Enterprise Java" background to understand the subject.
My primary interest in this book was developing SOAP-based web services and clients, so I skipped the material in Chapter 4 concerning RESTful web services. Likewise, the I skipped the last chapter ("Beyond the Flame Wars"), which was a completely gratuitous discussion of the various web services-like technologies (e.g. CORBA) that brought us to this point.
The basic material on using JAX-WS to develop services and clients is very good. The author also has a good deal of information on deployment under Tomcat and Glassfish, which I found especially useful.
I would have liked for him to have more coverage of the WS-* security standards, although that is admittedly veering out of the "up and running" category and more into "advanced topics". I also would have liked to have seen some discussion of the competing web services stacks, such as Apache's Axis2 and CXF projects (the book focuses exclusively on Metro). Another thing that would have been useful (but which would have made for a much longer book) would be some discussion of web services support in the Eclipse and NetBeans IDEs. There's only a passing reference to the fact that certain tools in NetBeans make the generation of certain configuration files much easier.