Rating: 
Summary: A nice book for learning XML
Review: This book does a great job explaining what XML is - it is NOT just another computer data exchange protocol, surprisingly. It is a universal description language that has many real-life applications. But of course, to a software developer, the important thing is that it is the future of computing, a common language spoken among the universe of Internet computers. It is really the foundation of a lot of exciting new technologies for distributed and enterprise computing. XML and SOAP are the core of Microsoft .NET architecture. This book does a decent job explaining all these and much more about XML. A good book to own.
Rating: 
Summary: Specialized reference book for XML with JAVA
Review: This books starts out with a quick explanation and walkthrough or XML 1.0 specification that is pretty good. It is lacking a XML Schema (XSD) section as well covers very briefly the XSLT (XML Stylesheets) anyone wishing to anything with sytlesheets after reading this book will be disappointed. XPath coverage is pretty good as well as SAX, & DTD. XLink, XPointer, are talking about but nothing in depth. All example code is in JAVA. Anyone wanting specialized knowledge of ASP.NET / .NET / MS SQL usage of XML should look elsewhere (this is somewhat understandable due to the publish date.)
Rating:
Summary: Good Reference
Review: This is a good reference. Covers XML fundamentals well. Though it has some glaring mistakes like the meaning of ?,*,+ in a DTD, it does well on most of the other fronts. Note that XML Schemas are not covered in this book, so you should be aware of that before buying this book. Most probably it should be there in the next version though.
Rating:
Summary: A great XML book
Review: This is a great book. Short and to the point. It covers a large amount of subject matter without needing thousands of pages to do it. The reference section is very nice to have handy. All in all another great Nutshell book.
Rating:
Summary: A great XML book
Review: This is a great book. Short and to the point. It covers a large amount of subject matter without needing thousands of pages to do it. The reference section is very nice to have handy. All in all another great Nutshell book.
Rating: 
Summary: XML in a nutshell
Review: This is the most confusing technical book I have read in years. Examples are poor and while it brushes on most aspects of XSLT, it fails to explain concepts in a clear concise manner that you would expect of a 'in a nutshell' style book. Please don't waste your money - you would be MUCH better off not purchasing anything at all and studying one of many free online XML tutorials.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: This is the only XML book I have - I skimmed through several and this one was far and away the best. You will have to know what you are trying to do and sort of figure out which parts of the book to pay attention to as there is so much there. I spent some time with DTDs only to realize they were unnecessary for what I was doing. But the book allowed me to build an application from scratch.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent XML knowledge base for Advanced Programming
Review: To use this book, you will need to have at least a working knowledge of XML, and be willing to read it carefully and absorb the text. However, the sections on DTDs and Unicode are easily worth the price. I suggest this book as a strong reference guide to XML.
Rating: 
Summary: Not ready for prime time - Needs lots of editorial work
Review: What I was looking for: I have some familiarity with DTDs from using them
as an occasional reference when working with HTML documents, but I have
not had to be worry about the precise and subtle details. I am considering
using XML in some (database) applications, and would need to write and
modify some limited DTDs and use various of the capabilities covered in this
book. I have substantial experience developing and using formal grammars.
Hence, I was looking for a book that would explain the "why"'s of the
language - the intuitions behind the constructs (for example, how they
were intended to be used) and what was behind the inevitable tradeoffs
in a language design. A quick sampling of this book suggested that it might be a good fit.
However, it turned out to be what I would consider to be an early draft.
Linearization and pacing of the information is very poor:
- multiple times I could not tell whether an explanation applied
to the example above it or the one below it.
- new information would be introduced during the explanation of an
example without delineating that it was not part of the example.
- terms would be introduced in an offhanded manner and then not used until
many pages later as a key part of the definition of an important concept.
I found myself having to repeatedly searching for these items that had
not made an impression when I first read them.
- a couple of times I found the information critical to an explanation
was not presented until several paragraphs after it was used (needed).
- adding to the memory load on the reader, there were comments that
"came out of nowhere" and then went nowhere that I could tell.
Since seemingly off-hand remarks had turned out to be key definitions
(above), nothing could be dismissed as an interesting side comment
(which may be what they were intended to be). Multiple times I found myself muttering that the authors had made things
much more complicated than they needed to be. Many of these problems
could be fixed by first giving a simple statement of the general principle,
followed by examples, rather than "defining" the concept from sparse examples.
I repeatedly found myself re-reading passages trying to figure out what
the authors were trying to say. Overall, this book had a "sloppy" feel to it, closer to something that
was a spoken presentation than something intended as a written document.
I stopped reading on page 82 (I should have stopped much earlier) when
I hit the sentence "... you still have to declare it in the DTDs of your
valid documents." First, the sentence properly ended with "DTDs" - there
was no reason to mention "valid documents".
Second, the authors reverse the relationship: The validity of a document is
determined *relative to* a specified DTD, and is not an independent property
(ask yourself "DTDs of invalid documents"??).
In this case, most readers will know what the authors should have said
but it is too egregious a mistake. That the authors would have said/written
it and that it was not caught in the editorial process is illustrative of
why I categorize this book as "not ready for prime time".
Rating:
Summary: An in-depth XML reference
Review: XML
This book's an authoritative document: covering XML basics like DTD authoring and detailed discussion of attribute types - through to the more esoteric issues of character sets and the tricky XML namespace standards.
At every step, I found it easy to follow. It's not a book for the non-computer literate though; more aimed at people with an existing basis of technical knowledge. A techie web-designer would find it a good start. About a third of the book is filled with references. I don't know why, but my heart usually sinks when I see page-filling content like this - that said, ultimately it's the reference books like this that end up covered with scribbles and post-it notes, so while they might not make good reading, they're very useful.
It touchs on all the necessary bases - XSLT, XPath, XHTML, XLink, XPointers, CSS - I could go on. This book does. Heck of a basis for future reading: after two and a half years in XML, there's stuff in here that I haven't come across before!
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