Rating: 
Summary: Get started with XML
Review: If you need to get started with XML and its related technologies, this book is a great choice. Harold knows the subject inside out and his informal tone makes even such a huge tome very readable. The 3rd edition is a good improvement over 1st I've read a few years ago, the chapters were reorganized, updated and redundant material was removed.
Rating: 
Summary: Who said bad things are cheap?
Review: Its not enough being a very bad reference it is also very
expensive (...)
This book should not be allowed to be printed it is simply a hoax. Pages and pages spent with long examples containing long listings of useless data (like the USA baseball league examples) Those lists are spread all over the book, and if put together would consume more than a 100 pages of this book. The subject "XML" and its applications are approached slowly and superficially with POOR examples, the reading becomes uninteresting and fastidious. If one wants to waste money is better to through his bucks in the garbage! This book I wouldn't recommend for an enemy.
Rating:
Summary: This is where you start!
Review: Many beginners will be put off by the sheer size (1200 pages!) of this book. Big mistake. There aren't a lot of books that cover all the basics of XML technology, focus on the real needs of XML newbies, and do so in clear, readable prose. In fact, this may be the only one.The problem with XML is that you can use it for a lot of different things. (Hence those 1200 pages.) So people who write about it tend to be specialists in some specific area, like building XML web applications, or designing XML document schemas, etc. Or else they're markup standards wonks, good at picking out the tiny nits that make the whole concept work, but terrible at explaining what XML is *for*. Harold, by contrast, knows his readers, and knows what they need. He makes very few assumptions about what you already know. If you know how to use a text editor (but see below for a warning) and a web browser, you're ready to go. The author leads you step by step through all the basic concepts. There are a *lot* of steps, of course. But only the first 200 pages are absolutely essential for every reader. Not everybody needs to know about Document Type Definitions, Wireless Markup Language, or Scalable Vector Graphics. Not that there's any flab here -- all the different XML applications Harold describes are widely used, and it makes sense to include a good basic intro to all of them. Harold also avoids a mistake I myself probably would have made -- he carefully avoids dealing XML's historical baggage. XML is a limited version of SGML -- a technology that wasted decades floundering in its own complexity. For once history really is bunk. I do have some issues, more with the publisher than with the author. The big one is the sample text files on the CD -- all with Macintosh line endings! Judging from the screenshots, the author works mainly with Windows, so we can't blame him. If you're not a Mac person, you need a text editor that can handle these files, or a program for converting them. Notepad doesn't work, Wordpad does -- but complains a lot about "discarding formatting." If you're a vim user, add "mac" to the fileformats option. Actually, it's pretty silly to even bother with a CD for this kind of material. Attention publishers! Book buyers are not impressed by "bonus cd-roms" that contain freely available software and text files that would be easier to download from the web. Nor are they impressed by silly markteroid terms like "Bible". Who are you, Charleton Heston?
Rating:
Summary: Too wordy
Review: Obviously the anthor want to make this book as long as possible. But I dont know why! Life is too short to read this kind of wordy book. I would rather pay twice as much for a book w/ the same spirit, yet three times shorter!
Rating:
Summary: Great beginning XML book
Review: This book comes highly recommended for someone who may or may not know about XML but has very little idea how to understand it or start writing their own XML. One word of caution, please remember that with such a new technology this book can become outdated very quickly. You may become frustrated with the examples and/or code as the technology changes. The author's main example works with baseball statistics throughout the book. The book begins by introducing XML. It shows what XML looks like, how other technologies surrounding XML (CSS, XSL) fit together, various versions of XML (like the Chemical Markup Language) and building your first XML document with the standard 'Hello World!' example. Next comes the meat of the book. The author discusses how to effectively structure your XML using elements and attributes. He shows what is proper and improper XML structure and briefly shows how XSL can format your XML. The author spends quite a bit of time on Document Type Definitions (DTD's) which help you validate your XML. Please note that because this book is a bit outdated, the author does not treat Schema's, which are increasingly becoming popular as an alternative to DTD's (A great book that discusses DTD's vs. Schemas is Wrox's VB6 XML). After DTD's, we get an in-depth look at transforming your XML using both Cascading Style Sheets and XSL. XSL formatting is also treated. To finish the text, the author looks at what he calls "supplemental technologies" to XML - XLinks (like HTML hyperlinks for XML), XPointers (addresses specific parts of XML document) and namespaces (differentation between formatting and data in your XML/XSL) and the more advanced part of this book, XML applications where you would actually use your XML now that you have figured out how to write it. The book is a great introduction to XML and it does what it promises, it gets you up-to-speed on XML and has you writing your own documents right away.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent fat book on the document side of XML
Review: This book covers the document side of XML (XML, Schemas, Layout, Transformations, XHTML and more) in a good teaching way. For the data side of XML (Web Services etc. you have to grab a different book, a good one is Newcomer "Understanding Web Services").
The reader level is intended from beginner to advance. The beginner should probably start with a good thin book. If the beginner insists to start with this book, it would probably be easier to start with the third chapter (a concrete example) and read the overview chapters one and two at a later time. They simply require too much knowledge. Humans are not very good at the web browsers task to ignore everything they don't understand.
Important concepts are introduced at great leisure. The reader is watching, how things build up during the process of development. So you do not only see the results, but also the process. A great help for your own development. Still this book does not contain very much fluff and page fillers. Harold supplies plenty of thought food and only drowns the reader seldom in the richness of his knowledge.
With respect to schemas document type definitions are treated considerably more extensive than the XML schema language. Other possibilities are mentioned but not treated.
Also the treatment of layouts favors cascading style sheets over XSL formatting objects, which still have only meager support.
The quality of the bookbinding is horrible. The paper is too heavy for the book cover. My book cover only survived me reading the first couple of hundred pages. Also the book is too heavy for the strength of my hands. It is really a pity to give such an excellent book a so poor hardware.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice choice for beginning XML
Review: This book does a terrific job of covering every possible aspect of XML technology, but not in-depth enough for the professional. There is extensive coverage of DTD and Schemas, but not as detailed as some other titles. Let this be your first XML book, and plan to add additional books with more detail and examples.
Rating:
Summary: Great way to start
Review: This book is great way to learn XML. It has lots of example and the author writes well.
Rating:
Summary: Great way to start
Review: This book is great way to learn XML. It has lots of example and the author writes well.
Rating:
Summary: Cool, wish to have more examples on variables
Review: This book is really cool, however, I wish the author gave more examples on variables. It's worth the money to buy this book. I spent 2 days on XML tutorial, and it was a waste of my time, I was so frustrated, then I found this book. The Bible series is very good. I own a bunch of them. The book has a companion CD which is extremely helpful, also included is the XML/XSL compiler, very handy. Thanks for writing such a wonderful book. I'm a fan of the Bible series ever. I rated this book 4 stars because I would love to have more examples on variables, more on how to create XML tags in Java. In overall, it's the best in XML so far.
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