Rating: 
Summary: Only good for beginners
Review: This book is poorly organized. Its examples are of the most simple and basic forms. Its section on XSL and XSLT is so lightweight that it should have been omitted. This book will be of use to someone who has NO XML experience. But because it is so light weight, if you plan to do a lot of XML in the future you will end up buying more books on the topic.If you need to learn XML you should be looking at one of the O'Reilly books.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book for starters
Review: Very lucid, easy to understand, comprehensively covers topics from basic XML/DTD design, DOM/SAX parsers to implementing xml in a small e-commerce application. Good breadth and pleasure to read book.
Rating:
Summary: Good book, not enough explanations
Review: This book does a very good job of introducing you to the basics of XML. Once you read the first 5 chapters, you are pretty clear about the basic concepts related to XML. But its after that, that the book falls apart. The chapters on DOM and SAX are not well-explained, and seem a bit shallow. There is quite a bit more to these APIs than mentioned in the book. If the book was intended for "real world", then it fails, because the information given in the chapters after chapter 5 is definitely not enough to write real world applications. The last few chapters are good for design of XML applications, but it seems there are just too many examples and not enough concepts explained. I understand that the book intends to teach "by example", but readers can't be expected to learn things out of reading code! There is another problem with the book also - its a bit old and out-dated. The chapter on XSLT, along with many other chapters, does not have information confirming to the current XSLT recommendation. All in all, an OK introductory book for XML, but not a master piece.
Rating: 
Summary: Where's the explanations?
Review: This book starts off well enough. But the author gives too many examples that do NOT go into any detail. Alot is left unsaid. This book is NOT for beginners. Interesting material, not a bad writer, just not enough explanation for one who is trying to learn XML. I'm already looking for a better book to read.
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Summary: NOT FOR BEGINNERS!
Review: I found this book very confusing in its explanations of XML. I am new to this type of development and needed something to show me the indepth steps of producing XML content as well as indepth explanation in deployment. I thought through example would lead me in the correct direction, I was completely wrong. I now know the jargon; however can do nothing with it... If you are new look elsewhere to learn XML.
Rating:
Summary: Confusing!!!!
Review: For a book that has "by Example" in its title, this one should be subtitled "without Explanation". There were indeed many examples but they were almost completely uncommented and very poorly explained. The author further didn't seem to be able to make up his mind as to what he really wanted to impart. "Here, study this, it isn't documented or codified but it handles this one tiny problem". I'm only glad that my work paid for the book not me personally.
Rating:
Summary: Good to start off with
Review: After being disappointed with "Java and XML" by Brett McLaughlin I found this book to be very good in providing and walking through examples. Benoit provides an easy to read writing style and gets concepts across nicely. One star off only because Elizabeth Castro's XML Visual Quickstart Guide is more concise and a lesser price. Recommended.
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Summary: Better Books Exist
Review: I got this book mainly based on the good reviews. I found that it is unfortunately not that great of a book. I found it to be clunky and an uninspiring read. Yes, I have experience with HTML and scripting, so I am part of the target audience. The flow of the book is interrupted by too many 'we will get to that in a later chapter' topics. I have found that even the Microsoft Press book XML Step by Step is a better starting point for this technology( although the price of that book is too high).
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Summary: Source Code Errors
Review: This book has source code that does not work. I typed two examples and tried to transform them using XT as well as attaching the stylesheet and they did not work. I then went online and got the source code from the publication site and STILL it would not work. I would NOT recommend this book. If it is not written well enough to catch source code example errors than it is not worth much in my mind.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent chapters on learning to program with xml parsers
Review: This comments pertain only to the chapters on xml parsers, since I haven't read the rest. The book is the only one that I've seen so far that dedicates a few chapters on programming with xml parsers. Most (beginner) xml books I've browsed don't even discuss the topic. Marchal did a superb job. I just wish he had done the book using Python programming language so the example codes are easier to read & understand for non-Java/JavaScript programmers. Python is a much more readable language.
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