Rating:  - Not very good
I have always had high expectation of Wrox for being the best in technical books, but this book was very disappointing. The book is good at telling what XML is and what the application of XML is good for, but does a very poor job at showing the HOW TO of implementing XML. Most of the codes demonstrated are in portions and tid bits and was very difficult to decipher.
Rating: - You can get a better book
I only wanted to know a couple of things related to XML well: working with the DOM and XSLT. Other things like Xlink, XPointer etc.. are yet really to be defined practically and face it folks - we will be married to implementations of the future. I would tell anyone getting this book to reconsider and check out the Dietel & Dietel XML How to Program book. Sure the samples are in Java, Perl, ASP and VB, but you should be able to figure things out AND they do a much better job with XSLT and DOM.
Rating:  - Book to the topic
The book is well written, has many examples, gets from the basics of vb and xml til complex stuff. it also explains dom. negative aspects: the chapter treating xml and databases could be better, also the chapter treating xml and xsl through dom. recommended for average developers.
Rating:  - This book has its moments
Let's face it, there aren't many Visual Basic/XML related books out there right now. My best suggestion is really think about why you want this book. I bought it because I'm primarily a Visual Basic programmer and I had been working with XML over the web, and I wanted to pick up this book and see what ideas these authors had for integrating XML in to their VB app projects. I wasn't working on a relevant project myself and that was part of the reason I lost interest in this book so fast.
This book definitely is not for beginners of Visual Basic and in fact, I would definitely suggest having some prior knowledge of XML even though the first two chapters provide a quick intro to XML. Perhaps this isn't a comment so much about the book as it is about using XML in VB, but having to learn and use the Microsoft XML DOM 3.0 library reference within Visual Basic meant there were tons of examples and lots and lots of code to type up. In fact, the authors actually create a VB program that parses XML code and it is somewhere along the lines of 10 pages of code!
This book has its moments, I liked the sample application chapter to see how it all tied together and if you love examples, you will see TONS of them throughout this book -- if you are familiar with Wrox, half the text in this book is in grey shading (meaning code example). But overall, as other reviewers have also pointed out, it covers a great deal of stuff without doing one particular thing exceptionally well (sample application withstanding). If your boss has definitely said "Mix XML into your VB app!", this book is probably your best choice. But if there was one thing I learned from this book, it's that I'd rather continue to use XML over the web than in my desktop or distributed VB applications right now.
Rating: - Not much of use in this book
This is one of only two books on the market presently that attempt to describe how you can integrate XML into your VB project. The only chapters I found useful, however, were 1 through 3. This book alone was insufficient to teach me the basics of XML and how I could integrate it with my VB project. I had to do a great deal of research on the Web to supplement the information provided in this book. The authors quote extensively from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which can be read directly and more up-to-date on the Web.
The most useful information I derived from this text was the introduction to XML covered in Chapter 1 and the understanding that there are two ways to parse XML in a VB project: using either the Document Object Model (DOM) or Simple API for XML (SAX). The authors describe how to use the Microsoft XML parser (MSXML), and at the time this book was written, MSXML supported only the DOM. As of July 2000, however, it also supports SAX. Therefore, the text covers only MSXML's support of the DOM interface.
The editing of this book is sloppy, so it was a challenge to match the references in the text to what actually appears on the accompanying CD. Once I located the appropriate files, however, I did find it useful to work through the DOM examples. The SAX examples, though not supported by the MSXML at the time (I had to download a third-party tool to work through the examples) were useful insofar as I gained a clear understanding of the differences between manipulating XML using the DOM and SAX interfaces.
Once I mastered XML, I haven't found any need to reference this book again.
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