Rating:  - Excellent starter for .NET & XML
I was looking for a book to get me started in XML. I wasn't interested in Web Services or anything like that, I just wanted to learn how to read through and do some clever things with XML.
This book really helped me a lot. This should be the starting place for all .NET programmers wanted to begin XML. I appreciate the book it has helped me tremendously.
Rating: - Great C# XML Guide
This book is very well written with practical examples in C#. If you are an experienced developer you won't need much more. Enough said.
Rating:  - Solid book, broad but shallow
This book has a number of flaws, but it's still a useful book for learning about using XML in the .NET world.
There are a number of weakness in the book in that it's rather shallow and leaves out details or concerns on a number of topics. Examples include skimming over a DataSet's ability to infer a schema when reading data in. Are there any drawbacks? When would you use this? When might you want to avoid it?
So with the negatives out of the way, let me focus on the positives, because they're definitely there. There's a lot of content on a broad range of topics. There's a very solid introduction to XML which is soundly and concisely written. The discussion of SAX and DOM is nicely done, and there are a large number of fundamentals which are well-written.
You'll be able to learn the basics on things like XML's use of DTDs, how schemas roll into things, the basics of validation, and a number of other topics. The chapter on XML in ADO.NET has some good coverage on XML support in DataSets, and there are solid chapters on Web Services, SQL Server support, and a chapter which combines remoting, XML in ASP.NET, and configuration files. Joshi also wraps in a chapter on XML's role in WCF.
I think the book's a solid introduction to XML in the .NET world.
Rating:  - no more "pro" books for me
Book is extremly poorly written and covers just a little more than MSDN documentation.
The entire book is copy-pasted template paragraphs of the following format:
- 2-3 lines of code
- a paragraph of 5-10 lines explaining what it does, almost always following the same template:
"The code creates a class named Employee with five public properties: EmployeeID, FirstNmae, LastName, HomePhone and Notes... " page 284
"The code creates an instance of the proxy class... The code then binds..." 287
"The code creates a form-level var... The code then creates..." 288
"The code creates an instance ... It then sets..." 289...
and so on the entire book.
Imagine someone commenting every line of code he's written. EVERY line. And using the same copy-pasted phrase for that.
For example:
page 283 contains a simple class Employee with 5 simple properties (name, id etc.) Nothing more. That simpliest straight-forward code is spread over 2(!) pages (seriously, I can send you a scan of the page if you like, huge empty space in between the code lines), with a paragraph before the code and after, explaining what is inside this class.
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