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 One word of caution, please remember that with such a new technology this book can become outdated very quickly.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 Please note that because this book is a bit outdated, the author does not treat Schema's, which are increasingly becoming popular as an alternative to DTD's (A great book that discusses DTD's vs. Schemas is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: I got 80% of the introduction to XML that I was looking for!
Review: This book focussed on the technical aspects of XML: writing well-formed and valid XML documents, preparing DTDs to constrain document content and layout and transforming these XML documents into other XML as well as HTML documents. The author also highlighted the much wider scope of X-Links and X-Pointers compared with the customary HTML links. I was unable to use my tried-and-true tactic of learning by working through the examples since - as the author kept emphasizing - most of the technology is not yet supported by the major browsers. Moreover, I was expecting to learn more on how XML could help me to deliver dynamic content to web sites; particularly how I could use it to draw data from various database and non-database sources. I had to rely on a couple of the articles from Microsoft's MSDN Library to fill in the pieces. In fact, the MSDN Library enlightened me about schemas - and the great advantages they provide compared with DTDs, the XML DOM and the provision for building XML islands within HTML documents. Of course, I was able to understand all the MSDN stuff as a result of the solid groundwork laid by the XML Bible. I am now looking forward to reading the 'XML IE5 Programmer's Reference' and some other XML applications book to round out my understanding of what seems to be a very exciting and promising technology!
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: 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: 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.
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