XML Bible [With CDROM]

This book is terrific, and if you want to learn about using XML in web sites I recommend that you buy it.XML books are, on the whole, pretty lousy. Everyone keeps talking about how XML will transform the web, but most books are thin on specifics -- exactly how XML will be used, and exactly how to make things happen. I've seen other reviews here from people who feel that this book doesn't do a good enough job of explaining those things. But I think that compared to its competition, it does an excellent job.XML is new, and it's not in widespread use. As I write this, the only popular browser with solid XML support is IE5, and I guess that most people don't want to write sites that only work with one browser. But if you go to the XML site at msdn.microsoft.com and look at the table of contents, you'll get an idea of what XML can do, and why you'll want to learn it.The book is well written and its a pleasure to spend time with it. The author knows as much about writing as he does about computers, and he knows a lot about computers. The explanations of XML are clear and conversational in tone. The focus is on using XML in web sites, and the book gives a lot of needed attention to XSL, the style sheet language used to format XML docments for the web. I've read other XML books, and I bought this one primarily to learn more about XSL.The title of the book might be somewhat misleading. It is not a comprehensive guide to XML, but rather a best of breed tutorial on a very important chunk of XML stuff you'll want to learn. One reviewer pointed out that it's a poor reference book, and that's true, in a sense. There is an XML reference in an appendix, but it's an ultra-geeky BNF reference that probably won't be very helpful to most readers, especially given the book's non-programmer target audience.A more serious problem is the book's neglect of Microsoft's XML schema technology, which is far superior, in my view, to DTDs. The word "schema" doesn't even appear in the index. And finally, this is not the book you want to buy if you want to learn how to program a java XML parsing engine. This is not a book about programming.So why do I give this book five stars? It's fun to read and it's great at explaining XML itself, as well as a number of vital, connected technologies: XSL, DTDs, CSS, CSL, XLinks, and XPointers. I was fuzzy on XSL, XLinks, and XPointers, and this book helped me a lot. Those are exactly the things you need to know to get a XML site up and running on the web.XML is a big, important technology, and I don't think there's a single book that covers everything you'll want to know. This book, despite the "Bible" title, doesn't try to cover everything. But what it does cover, it covers very well.

I found this to be well written, concise and extremely informative. I have some experience writing web pages in HTML but am not an expert webmaster my any means. I found that he presented the ideas in good detail, and usually referenced well known web resources (W3.org, etc.) as places to get further detail on specific concepts. Mr. Harold didn't waste words or space on irrelevant fluff as so many technical writers are wont to do. If I have one issue with this book, it would be that Mr Harold uses too many baseball references in his examples - most of that data was completely lost on me, a baseball (un)fan.All in all, I found this book to be well worth the investment. It will have a place on my reference bookshelf for a long time to come.

Great examples and references. The CDROM is packed with utilities, browsers and source code. An easy writing style makes this book easy to read and technically acurate. Real world examples actually let you start writing style sheets and documents in the first few chapters. I'll post another feedback when I finish the book. So far I am very pleased.

This book gives one of the better introductions to XML I've seen. Rather than limiting the scope to a simple overview of the concepts, Elliote Rusty Harold incorporates useful examples that allow the reader to begin experimenting with XML right away. The book is not going to get a beginner coding e-commerce solutions using XML. For that kind of work further reading is definately required. But this book does cover all the neccessary concepts to get started and does a better job than most explaining XSL - the key to actually using your XML documents. I'd highly reccommend this title as a starter to anyone's XML collection.

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.