Rating:  - A Candy giving Headaches
No doubt this is a must for beginners in XML, and after a long time the GODs at Wrox decided to grace us poor programmers who are not gurus with a Beginning book. The way they had been churning out Professional series out of their factories I had already prepared my obituary for the Beginning series.
About the book. One of the best on the block for XML. Language is simple, easy to understand, and handles complex topics like XSLT very deftly.
Downside. Very very wordy. This is the first time I see in a Beginning series the author spending so much ink and pages on simplest of topics. Strangely enough some complex topic are written off in half a page. Examples in XSLT dont work. Inspite of downloading the XT program which the author recommends, more than half of the examples of the book don't work, leaving you depressed and confused, you then tend to re-read the pages, trying to find if you missed anything... XML applications arent covered in a greater detail and neither are practical examples for XML use shown.
In my opinion even with its faults this book is still, one of the better ones on the block, try skimming thro the earlier pages a bit faster if you don't want to be put to sleep. Don't waste too much time if the books XSLT examples don't work, just buy this books to get your basics covered and made strong.
Lastly, as I have mentioned again and again, Wrox beginning series are no longer what they used to be, and if anyone at wrox is reading this, I pleade them to get back on their earlier motto of providing quality books like the beginning asp/asp databases/javascript series, or end up losing their fans like me.
Rating: - Good but..not excellent.
This books is satisfactory..The first 10 chapters are good, the Schema Chapter 11 forgot how to tell the XML document which Schema do you want to use (This is a confusing figure it out chapter). The XML Databases chapter is poor, only showing examples with SQL Server (What about standard SQL databases, not the MS one).
The book is almost 900 pages but only 500 are material, the final 400 are case studies and appendixes.
However this is not a bad book, but is not the best way to start learning XML.
XML is not the replacement of HTML. If you want to write XML to convert it to HTML with XSL then you will take twice the time to create them, not an intelligent move. The true power comes when you want to interchage data between applications, not only web (you can use it with desktop applications with C++, Delphi, Java, VB, ASP or any other programming way) or to talk with a web server sending an XML request and receiving an XML response that you can parse with DOM or SAX.
Recommended but you will need other books to go on.
Rating:  - Solid Intro to XML and related technologies
Having worked with XML for over a year, I was skeptical when a colleague recommended this book as an introduction for XSLT. But, I found it an excellent read. Using this book, I've built a small portal framework that uses XML and XSLT to seperate the logic and presentation layers. I also took the time to read the rest of the book and found it accurate and clear. Especially the part about namespaces.
Now, if Wrox would just do something about these ugly covers! I'll look in a mirror when I want to see a computer geek. :-)
Rating:  - I'll have to agree -- possibly best beginning XML book
I want to learn how to use XML to it's fullest extent, and this book provides a solid foundation. It expanded my view of XML from "just another web techology" to one that I can use for data transfers between data bases, legacy systems, and web sites.
Improvements can be made, however. The chapter on the SAX parser requires clarification. Setting the CLASSPATH variable for java is really important, and the author neglected to cover it for Windows 95/98 users. But, when I got the CLASSPATH right, the examples worked perfectly. The author should also cover perl and ASP interfaces since they are popular programming languages.
Now that I've gotten Beginning Perl under my belt, I can move onto the more advanced XML books by Wrox.
Rating: - Possibly the best Intro book to XML
Hi,
I have been looking at number of XML books and I recently found the "Beginning XML" from Wrox which was really by far the best I have seen.
The book is very clearly explained. One of the thing that I particularly like about it is that the table of content is well-designed. While this may sounds trivial, it is not the case for many other Intro XML books I have seen, who typically tend spend too much time on the genesis of XML and little if any to topics of interest to programmers (The XML DOM or SAX for example). For this reason, I think that this book is the right book to get started. Perhaps complemented sometimes along the line by a another book dealing more in-depth with the specificities of the programming environment you are dealing with (such as the Java xml, VB xml or asp xml books by the same publisher).
The one thing that I was lukewarm about were some of the case studies: while designing a threaded discussion board with XML is ingenious, it is also one of the most difficult and inefficient ways that I could think of doing it.
The book cover indicates that this books is aimed at more or less every user. In my opinion, the book is aimed at experience web developers (knowing at least HTML) who understand basic programming concepts and have some programming experience (with anything). It does not on the other hand require the user to be fluent at all in Java, VB, ASP or Javascript for instance (although readers who have such knowledge will appreaciate some of the examples).
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