Professional XML

Many of the comments appearing on this book apply to the first edition, not the second. It was just released in May 2001 and many of these comments pre-date that. That being said, having owned the first edition I was a little hesitant to buy this as many second editions can be 80 to 90 percent rewrites of the first. I thought the first edition was a good book. This is a GREAT book!More clearly written, examples are more clear and concise, good coverage on many different technologies, not just Microsoft's. Expanded coverage on XLink, XPointer, and formatting objects to name just a few.Well done!

I could find all XML releated subjects in the topics of this book i.e. XML syntax, Document Type Definitions (DTD), data modeling, Document Object Model (DOM), Simple API for XML (SAX) 1.0, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), , namespaces, schemas, linking, XML--database integration, server to server transfers, eBusiness applications, and SOAP.It is very usuful for beginners and some advanced programmers in XML. Thanks to authors for this collabrative study.Volkan Evrin

Awesome "self-teach" book. I've been programming for years, but was new to XML and needed to start using it in my applications, so I had just the very basic concepts of what XML was before I started reading. This book is very complete, gives tons of practical examples and guidelines, and provides many external references. This is the ONLY book you will need to learn XML effectively on your own.As others have stated here, the only real downside to the book is that it repeats many concepts more than once, so it is NOT the best choice for a reference book.

I have bought several xml books and this one has educated me, taught me and interested me the most. There's no doubt the Wrox technical books are a match to the Oreilley in terms of readability and thoroughness. This book is a little peculiar in that it is written by several people, each contributing a separate chapter. As an introduction, it probably wouldn't be too helpful (although that wouldn't be a problem for someone with a programming background). The strengths of the book (at least what I've read so far) is the discussion of sax v. dom, the section on business applications on edi (really interesting for me), and the great reference source in the back. Can you believe I have xeroxed the css list of command options in the back--amazingly useful? The variety of writers give a fresh perspective, which can be bad and good. With the exception of the first few chapters, which give a good overview, the rest of the chapters are a grabbag of subjects, including 4 case studies. These were very useful in learning xml. It also discussed WAP, which may or may not be useful, depending on how much enthusiasm there is for that standard. For variety's sake, I also bought, XML Unleashed, a bulky book with not as much organization, but just a lot of code (unlike the professional xml book, which really explained almost everything well). XML unleashed is helpful, because its topics really don't overlap with professional xml. It discusses SMIL, parsing xml with java xml tools on the market, using asp with xml and different subsets of xml (vml, and a variety of other specialized languages specific to one discipline. Unleashed is good because it contains discussions (albeit rather brief) of several different languages. Professional XML sticks to explanations and analysis, a lot of microsoft stuff (but not asp, and not too much stuff that linux lovers would want to reject the book. Finally I want to mention another book which I used as a first tutorial, Just XML by John Simpson. It's the best written of the three, although a little bizzare humor sometimes. It was written in late 1998 so some things may not be up-to-date (however simpson does a good job of emphasizing the things that weren't likely to change). This would be a good book for people starting, or if the book were available used. It would also be good when simpson publishes the second edition (later this year).

If you have started to play with XML but need to know where to go, this is the book for you. I rate this one as a "must have" book from Wrox just like the Professional ASP book... both are the top books on the market in their respective fields. I am using XML for content transformation and for Server to Server solutions so I was getting stuff done (in xml) but still had lots of questions. This book covers all the basic stuff and goes into some future technology as well but for the most part this book is for the working programmer who has to produce code quickly but couldn't figure everything out from site hopping.