Rating: 
Summary: Sloppy editing an embarrassment for O'Reilly
Review: This book appears to have been thrown together overnight, without the attention of a proofreader or content editor. While I can't say it's actually missing important content, it is certainly the sloppiest O'Reilly book I've ever read. The very first example (on p. 6) is a glaringly ill-formed XML document (the second line contains spurious junk text, as if from a word-processing error), and it just continues from there. The book contains numerous apparent "cut-and-paste" errors of this kind, as well as evidence that global search-and-replace operations were hastily performed on the entire text without subsequent proofreading. What's up, O'Reilly?
Rating:
Summary: An Editing Nightmare
Review: This book had potential to be a definitive guide to XML schema. This is not the kind of book you can pick up and read cover to cover (unless insomnia is a real condition for you, in which case this book may help). It is, by no means, a tutorial of XML schema - or even a reference. It's more of an exploratory academic walk of the W3C recommendation and all of its foibles and nuances. There is wealth of information in this book, if you can glean it out from inbetween the droning prose and historical diatribe.O'Reilly should be shamefully embarassed for ever letting this book go to print in the condition it is. It is replete with errata, typos, and slopped together examples. This book is destined to frustrate those new to XML schema. An uncharacteristicly poor level of quality for O'Reilly.
Rating: 
Summary: Tough read
Review: This book is very dry and terse. It has all of the required content but it doesn't provide much perspective of how it should be used. You could use it as a reference, but I recommend the XML Schema Companion before this one.
Rating:
Summary: Too terse and academic
Review: This book tries to cover far too much in too little space, much of which is taken up by examples that are not that great and lack any type of highlighting, arrows, boxes, etc. that would help you quickly find the relevant pieces. Regardless of whether the author had a page limit or simply favors a terse and academic style, the net result was that I had to seek other sources to understand numerous points, and they universally explained the topic much more logically and in an easy to follow and, more importantly, read fashion. All in all a very painful read.
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