XML Application Development with MSXML 4.0

Rating:
Summary: Great, but keep Kay handy
Review: MSXML4 is the fastest XML parser in the world and this book gives you needed details to take advantage of it. Some of these chapters are a gold mine. Some have obviously been sitting around from a couple years ago.
Please Wrox, stop it! I'll pay the same price to have the gold mine chapters alone.
Micheal Corning's chapter is filled with truly worthwhile stuff about the parser, coming as it does from Redmond. Danny Ayer's chapter on implement a XLink system is really brilliant and well written. Corning and Ayer show that you can be thoughtful and literate when writing about the specifics of a new technology.

The chapter on XPath is really incomplete to the point of not being an unusable reference. For the concat function we are given the example of concat('sku','562','B'). Now exactly why would anyone do this? Pointless examples do not help anyone. The concat function is almost always used for placing XML data with literal text. I use concat is creating URLs like this

.

With the contains function we are not told what happens if the second string is zero length. It always returns true, which seems pretty odd to me, which, in turn, makes it something worthwhile to mention.
Also, I don't see any mention of one of XPath's weirdest quirks. Namely, if a item in a filter evaluation is a nodelist, that XPath has uses an ANY semantics. That is too say

//product[@price>$Specials/@price]
gives us products that are more expensive than any of the specials.
The fault here is with the Wrox editors, not the authors. Chapters 9 10 and 11 are also great.
A very worthwhile, nay, essential book for Microsoft technology.

Alas, the book is already slightly out of date as MS has released MSXML4 SP1.
You will need to add
oXMLResp.setProperty("NewParser", True) to various places in the code

Rating:
Summary: Very readable and has good level of detail
Review: The book is very readable; I read half the book in one sitting and found that the flow from one topic to the next was very natural.

To start with this book covers pretty much all versions of MSXML, including older non standard features such as WD-xsl. Naturally there is more focus on the new standards, but examples and recommendations are given for all. One feature I very much appreciated was a list of versions that shipped various OS / Browser / Major Applications.

This book also scores highly as a lot of examples are giving in Jscript, but also includes examples in VB COM and VBScript.