No idea, I'm afraid - I've never been quite sure whether SOA is
actually a meaningful concept or whether it's what people have been
doing for years. Either way, I haven't read any books about it in
particular :(

Hello Rob,

RS> I will be designing a service oriented architecture. The service
RS> pulls data from many different types of sources ranging from AS400
RS> to Oracle to Flat files.
RS> I was hoping that someone could recommend a book for me.

there are not so many books about SOA (see amazon.com).
U should understand, that SOA it's only principles, policy and conceptions
to build your apps, but not the detailed guide.

What's the problem with you task? The variety of sources heads for the central
canonical model of keeping data.
You can use XML for this and iterating with sources based on XML and using
XSLT to convert to the canonical form

---
WBR,
Michael  Nemtsev :: blog: http://spaces.msn.com/members/laflour

"At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not
cease to be insipid." (c) Friedrich Nietzsche