Addison Wesley got Martin Fowler to put his John Hancock on the Martin Fowler Signature Book Series, an excellent collection of books on software.
The Recommended.Reading.1 entry is reserved for Enterprise Integration Patterns, the most excellent book by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Wolfe. The book is all about using messaging to address enterprise integration issues. Although the book talks primarily about messaging, it is, in my opinion, the best book on service-oriented architecture on the market today. The material covers the depth and breadth of techniques related to messaging solutions, and references while stopping short of diving into the details of business process management systems [and rightfully justifying that as beyond the scope of the book].
The authors have maintained a website throughout the writing of the book, publishing early versions of the patterns for feedback, so you can get a little bit of the "try" before you bite off on the "buy."
As with most pattern books, the two most tangible benefits are codifying implemented, working and workable solutions to common problems and providing a common vocabulary by which to discuss the application of the solutions to new problems. For instance, if you are familiar with the patterns in the book, then I can make a statement like "The transaction aggregation system consolidates transactions from all of the lines of business (LOB). To increase the reliability of the solution, we will use Guaranteed Delivery with an Idempotent Receiver. To minimize the server utilization, the receiver will be an Event-Driven Consumer Service Activator. The messages will contain a Correlation Identifier to allow the LOB applications to correlate the acknowledgements, and will utilize a Messaging Bridge to connect the WebSphere MQ on the AS/400 and the Windows 2003 MSMQ.
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