Rating: 
Summary: Trys to be everything for everyone
Review: I have over six years experience in SGML and wanted to find a book that would get me quickly to the nuts and bolts of XML. Aftyer reading the reviews here (yep I know, fatal mistake sometimes) I purchased this book and am disapointed. Too many ingredients in the soup I'm afraid. If you want a fat book that looks impressive on your shelf take mine. This book is trying to be an everything reference and fails.
Rating: 
Summary: Best XML resource
Review: I have read many XML books, and this is definately the best book for both beginners and advanced users. It has a strong theoretical perspective and plenty of examples to make a comprehensive resource for XML based applications. It can be even used as a reference. I strongly recommend the book.
Rating: 
Summary: The Good the Bad and the Ugly
Review: I haven't finished this book yet (I simply haven't found the time) so my rating may change.So far, this is the best book I've read for XML. It is very thorough on the XML details. However, it tries to describe all of the technologies used with XML, doing a fair job with JavaScript but not so good with Java. The author admits that this is not a Java tutorial but an attempt to give enough knowledge in order to understand the other sections on Java and XML. However, the author makes a number of small errors and uses poor style. The book is much longer than necessary due to the way examples are constantly repeated, with changes highlighted at each stage. This is an annoying style and is not applied consistently throughout the book (thankfully). You will find yourself flipping pages quite a lot to get to the next meaty bit. The XSL section is extensive but superficial. The language isn't described as thoroughly as the earlier XML sections and you will probably need another book to give you a really good feel for XSL. Overall, a good XML book but variable treatment of the areas it covers.
Rating:
Summary: Great Comprehensive Guide to XML
Review: I highly recommend this book to anyone who's looking for up-to-date XML coverage from a to z. While it's rather large at 1000 pages, it's worth the price because I didn't have to purchase more than one book, this one has everything I need at this point. In addition, the author is superb at explaining things in an easy to understand manner, something I find very useful in technology books today. I'm very impressed with this publisher. They've published some of the best books this year (seen Jakob Nielsen's book) and I will certainly be purchasing their books in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Great writing style!
Review: I love the way the book displays code and highlights the section in discussion. Some have commented that its fluff but it sure is effective and it sure makes it easy and clear for the reader to follow. Nice topic selection - however, a little too broad with related xml technologies. This book is excellent for both beginner's and intermediate xml.
Rating:
Summary: exceptionally well written
Review: I think, learing a technology is best possible, if it is explained in an interesting, clear and organized manner. This book does just that. The details are great, the style is even excellent. This is a must buy for anyone who wants to learn basic, intermediate, and many advanced features of XML.
I rate this, one of the best XML books I have.
Rating:
Summary: Best Overall XML Book
Review: If you can buy only one XML book, buy this one. It is the most comprehensive treatment in one volume, but is written in a readable style. Some complain it does not provide complete information on any one topic. If it did, it would be 10,000 pages long. XML is just too complex. However it has enough information to help you create, parse and display XML documents, with plenty of references for more information you may need. I disagree with comments about code examples repeated with small changes. Done any other way, the reader would have to constantly page back and forth between examples and confusion might result. I recommend this as a foundation book in your XML library.
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive, Well Organized, Great value for money
Review: Inside XML by Steven Holzner is probably the most comprehensive book written on XML so far. Each of the one thousand and fifty nine pages (excluding index) contains judicious and practical information for anyone willing to learn almost everything about XML. The logical organization of knowledge and adroit arrangement of information in the book make reading a joy. Can this be the only book you need to read about XML? I think yes. XML indeed is the future of business and communication on the net. Many analysts believe that despite its wonderful portability and universal compatibility, XML has yet to achieve practitioners' acceptance and approbation. XML standards have not been practiced as ubiquitously as analysts had expected. List of major reasons for its slow advance includes lack of browser support and functional inconsistencies of currently available XML parsers. I always believed that "lack of quality literature on XML" also contributed to XML's limited success. "Inside XML" has definitely eliminated this particular reason from my list of reasons for XML's slow progress. Author has discussed CSS, DOM and SAX parsers, XSL, XHTML, RDF and CDF with the help of relevant and interesting examples. This was missing in some of the recent books on XML. I recently read three other books on XML including Benoit Marchal's XML by example and John Simpson's Just XML. I found Inside XML more useful as it covers a much broader range of topics and technologies than those covered elsewhere. Important topics such as server-side XML are covered in a way that an instructor can develop instructional plans based on this coverage. A detailed discussion on Microsoft specific technologies has made this book a great resource for programmers and developers too. Inside XML can be used to develop certification material. Material presented in this book can also be used for developing a one-semester senior level course on XML technologies. This book has a high information-value to price ratio and I can confidently recommend the book to anyone interested in practicing XML for the real world. Students, developers and instructors can equally benefit from the material presented in this book.
Rating:
Summary: It¿s a real appetizer
Review: Inside XML Inside XML, written by Steven Holzner, is an excellent start for a beginning web programmer as well for an experienced web site developer. The author has succeeded in explaining the variety of subjects concerning XML in a very understandable way. He has achieved this by presenting very complex items in such a way that the items become very simple to understand. The book also provides useful examples and references to sites for more information on the subjects. The book delivers a complete overview and covers the following items: DTDs, XML schemas, client-side XML handling using DOM and JavaScript, server-side handling using DOM, SAX and Java. Related items like XSL, XSLT, VML, SMIL, HTML+TIME, XHTML, RDF, CDF are discussed. Last but not least the book describes how to combine CSS with XHTML/XML. The book is very usable for creating XML courseware, for beginning and experienced web developers. I personally enjoyed the reading of this book, and felt that my time and money was well spent. The book is complete. Readers get a helicopter view of the sprawling XML subject, and leave the book with the knowledge they need to start using XML, and references to site where they can continue learning. It's a real appetizer.
Rating: 
Summary: Long Winter's Night Reading
Review: Inside XML reminds me of War and Peace with over 1000 pages of information. This is a good book for someone with a programming background. The font is smaller but there is a multitude of coding which can be copied and used on a web site. The six-page content section is laid-out very simply making it easy to locate an item. With an index of 40-pages, there should not be any trouble finding any information.
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