Rating: 
Summary: Excellent coverage of XML and related technologies
Review: This books is not only a great introduction but also a good resourse for in-depth knowledge. The style of writing and interesting examples keep you going through this heavy tome.I am glad I bought this book and I would recommend this to anyone looking for a XML desktop reference. The book may contain outdated material. But the author maintains a website where you can find the latest version of all the topics. Great work! Elliotte.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Book
Review: This is a very good book among all the XML books i have read so far. I thank the author very much because after reading few XML books i was very frustrated whether i will be able to learn XML or not. They were just roaming and not to the point. Finally i found the right book. The first two chapters review XML as a whole which i think will not intereset much to beginners like me. But then the author goes in step by step, teaches the concepts from scratch and the next 10 or 12 chapters cover a lot sequentially. Since its a new technology, we cannot expect all the browsers to support the codes in the book right now. but the codes work with some of the freely available parsers in the net. I would recommend this book to start with XML and get accustomed to the technology in a fair and easy way.
Rating:
Summary: Very useful and interesting book ..
Review: This is one of the best books on XML, infact THE best, that I have seen so far. Though this book does not cover programming with XML, it does a great job at explaining XML documents, DTDs, CSS and XSL. I am not the kind of guy who can read a technical book from cover to cover, but this book was a cool exception. ERH is a great author and reading through his book was like reading through a novel. There were lots of examples and they were very illustrative. After reading this book, you may not become an expert in using XML parsers with Java or Perl, but you definitely can write your own XML documents, DTDs, Cascading style sheets and XSL. If you are new to XML, this could be a very good first book to read. If you are a baseball fan, you will enjoy the book more because ERH goes about developing an XML document for baseball leagues throughout the course of the book. The examples start out easy and gradually blow up in size. Each concept is clearly explained before it is used and there were very less forward references anywhere. I hope ERH writes another book for Java/XML programmers. He is one author who consistently delivers great stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Please review the author's books, not his politics
Review: To the previous reviewer - this is a vehicle for evaluating the book in question not for sharing your misinterpretation of the author's political statements.
Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Good, Surprisingly Useful
Review: When I first saw this book I thought that someone must be kidding. There's no question that XML is clearly the language to use when you want to transfer data using the standard web communications protocols. But a book that's more than a thousand pages, get serious.
They I opened it, low and behold, links, style sheets, specialized forms of XML for specialized purposes that have been agreed upon by multiple competing companies. It turns out that there's a lot more to XML than I thought.
Then in conjunction with XML other languages have been developed, some have proved not so useful and have faded away, others have evolved and changed to be more useful.
All in all, this is a very useful book, well written and has given me some ideas about how to solve some problems. That's all you can ask out of a book.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Examples
Review: While I think that for the most part XML Bible is a very comprehensive book that provided me with a good introduction to using XML, I really have to criticize the example programs the author uses. There are two examples that Harold uses throughout the book. One (the baseball stats one) contains 47 elements, takes up three pages, and is entirely too long to follow easily, even if you *do* understand baseball. The other (Hello World!) contains only one element and is useless beyond it's appearance as the first program you work with. I found that as a result of having just these two examples (one horribly complicated and one overly simplified) made things hard to follow sometiems. Indeed, the chapter on DTD's, one of the more complicated chapters in the book, was much more difficult to grasp than it should have been. Some other examples programs show up in the second half of the book, but if you prefer lots of example programs when you are just starting out, or if you like to type them in yourself, look for a book with some middle ground, rather than one that goes to the extreme ends of simplicity and complexity.
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