Markup Languages Books

For the most part, industry standard RSS is a very short list of simple XML elements. Standard RSS Readers only look for those standardized tags to create the display. You can verify that by opening almost any public RSS XML document and just looking at it. RSS is simple enough that you could probably pick it up by just looking at a well formed sample file and reading the short syntax document provided for free by the creators (UserLand Software for RSS 2.0 or the RSS-DEV Working Group for RSS 1.0 - FeedValidator.org has links to the documentation). After reading this title, I am a little confused as to whom target audience is supposed to be.

The first issue I had with the book is the coverage of versions. The author has chosen to write not only about the two current versions (1.0 and 2.0 - two companies, two separate tracks of standardized tags), but the preceding versions for each. I don't buy a Word 2003 book to learn about Word 6. The layout could serve as a reference guide for the tags when you're done, but again, the vendor provided syntax guides are easier to reference. Next, the author makes some assumptions that aren't publicized; you should be really (really) familiar with XML to understand many chapters in the book, and you should also develop in Perl (as there are numerous, lengthy Perl scripts used as demos). I've created many RSS Feeds for both company Intranets as well as Internet sites, and given the simplicity of RSS, I can tell you that you don't need either to create a feed on your own.

The back cover claims the book is a "step-by-step guide to implementation", but it really isn't. The author has written a very nice book on the general history and specs of standardized RSS, but then fills the remaining pages with a general syntax overview of other commonly used RSS XML namespaces (not really demo-ing them), ideas for extending RSS with your own XML namespaces (which is great, but really just produces a customized XML document that industry standard RSS reader's won't know what to do with) , and then transforming other site's RSS Feeds into your own conglomerated XHTML page with various Perl conversion scripts, SOAP tie-ins, etc.

For the percentage of people that already know RSS and are looking to really go into advanced manipulations - this is a great title and I recommend it. For everyone else who just want to quickly learn the very simple syntax, this is a misleading title and I would recommend saving your money and reading the vendor's free syntax guides, or talking a quick on-line course. You'll find RSS easy enough without this book.

I must underscore the reason why I capitalized the word "PRINTED" in the title of this review. This is indeed the best book about the topic of RSS (RDF Site Summary), which has become increasingly more important since blogs jumped out of tech obscurity to become a mainstream form of web-enabled information dissemination. However, nowadays the topic is too dynamic (there's too much happening these days in the field of RSS) to make Hammersley's book a comprehensive and current enough resource for all matters and purposes.

As a general introductory reading, it's the best book out there. But once you get your feet deep enough in the RSS waters, you need to go online and search for the current APIs, Web Services, News Aggregators and RSS/Blog Directories, which is the area where the book will fall behind the fast growth of this area. Overall, very well structured, even with an appendix on the XML you need to know, in order to be able to deal with RSS.

I was expecting this book to show me somewhere in the first hundred pages an example of how to create an RSS feed. Instead I got wayyyy too much history, and I couldn't find a "hello, world" example.

I grant that the history is important, and this book will probably fit in well to the cadre of books that emerge on RSS over the next year or two. However, this year, this isn't the book I needed.

RSS is just XML in a certain format. At its core, it's pretty basic.

The author goes into MUCH detail about the history of the format as well as older (and nowdays rarely used) RSS versions.

It was interesting reading the history, and the details on the format and extentions was great. It really helped me get up to speed on RSS.

I would like to have seen more discussion about what RSS could do though. If I was consulting the author on the 2nd version, I'd have suggested dropping the info about older formats and putting some info in about the new uses of RSS...like iPodder, or the Presidential debate feeds.

If you want to get started quickly, this is a good way to jump in.

This book really is a must-have (or must-read-once) for anyone interested in RSS syndication technology.

It contains a lot of information on creating RSS feeds and related scripts. Most of the non-RSS code is in Perl, so if you don't use Perl, some of the book might not be handy.

I was disappointed that the book didn't cover much of the user's end of syndication... things like scraping and RSS readers themselves, but that's obviously another book.

This is a really nice title if you're interested in the techie side of RSS, but if you're an end user, there won't be too much here for you aside from the bits of history.

While I have an solid understanding of HTML and server-side development, I needed to get up-to-speed quickly on CSS, DOM scripting, and Ajax. This book has been the perfect primer, explaining the concepts clearly, giving practical code example with explanation, and organizing the information in a very usable format. The writing is concise and informed by the author's experience, without having the cutesy humor so many technical books seem to feel obligated to employ in an effort to make their text more interesting. This is a good read for its content, and the style supports the information presented.

In fact, I came onto Amazon to see what else the author had written, and was somewhat surprised at the lack of reviewer enthusiasm for the book.

This has been the only book I needed to get up to speed on interactive client side programming. The added bonus was that there are basic examples of all the interface tricks I was looking to implement for basic dynamic content, controls, and navigation.

While this book (Fourth Edition) appears to be another quality release from Peachpit, it is unfortunately plagued by typos (rather unusual for this publisher). Code simply will not run properly due to occasional errors (often replicated in both the inline code and the illustrative tables/diagrams) and filenames are frequently incorrect. In addition, the auxillary red spot color is a nice visual break from the typical black text at first but isn't always implemented properly and eventually feels distracting. However, the major concepts and methods are addressed and presented well in the text.

Overall, probably not the best book to start off with from unless you also enjoy debugging the author's code as you go along. I'd wait until a 5th edition corrects all the typographical errors.

This is a great book for learning CSS, DHTML & AJAX. I needed something quick to pick up this language and the book worked perfect.

A great book for beginners as well as a good reference tool for programmers as well. I bought this book for my 14 year old son who used it to teach himself. He said it was well laid out and has used it quite often.

I looked through this book at a bookstore before buying and I was impressed with the idea of working through with visual examples about what could be done with different manipulations of code (something that is hard to quickly get on the web with many many clicks).

In using this guide, I have though become frequently exasperated by the execution because of confusing examples, what I believe to be mistakes in the code examples in the text, etc...

Out of date concepts, large print, tedious line-by-line code walkthroughs and a 200 page Appendix all conspire to make this book a waste of valued cash.

I bought this book with hopes of more discussion of how XML should be structured when integrated with CICS, or another Mainframe application. It seems to be totally a treatise on how Java should be coded: There are numerous examples of Java code, and would be helpful from that angle. I may find it helpful later when the bridges to mainframe data are understood by me.

I bought this book to learn more about enterprise application integration (I do systems integration consulting). Parts of the book were somewhat relevant, but by and large, this is an outdated Java and XML book. This book includes a primer on basic XML, and some introductory SAX and DOM examples, but at least a third of this book is useless filler like the XML spec from w3.org.

Buy O'Reilly's Java and XML by Brett Mclaughlin if you want to learn about XML and Java working together - he is the author of the JDOM API, and that book is much more up to date.

I'm still looking for a good Enterprise Application Integration/Middleware/data process book that explains best practices.

This is a serious book for java programmers, not for html writers. I found it excellent because: (1) It focuses on how to share data between different applications and servers, which is the topic a real world developer has to master. (2) It provides very good Java sample codes. After read this book, I finally understand how xml could transfer data in a B2B application.

But be careful, if one's background is webmaster or html author, She better picks a book on how to use xml for presenting contents. This is one for data sharing that can be used on B2B.

This is a good starter book for someone who is already familiar with java and is interested in learning simple integration techniques using XML. However, I have to agree with Annette Olson that this book is not for those who live and breathe integration and are looking for better, faster, more comprehensive integration solutions.

In my opinion this book provided far too much information on the basics of java and XML and not enough useful information about real world enterprise integration. The book claims to provided detailed information regarding integration into legacy applications, but after reading this book cover-to-cover, very little could be found on this subject

As for the "Top 500 Reviewer"(water_monkey) I would suggest that a more comprehensive educational regimen be implemented in order to bring yourself and your pupils up to snuff. Honestly, the java in this book was quite Ho-Hum. I skimmed over most of the first 7 chapters in search of the "heart" of the book. One would think that a professor would most certainly have a strong grasp on concepts relating to the relatively simple code provided by this book. I'm sorry to discover otherwise.

-john

java
xml
fun

I didn't know what HTML was before this book. Now I can write my own simple webpages. Excellent.

I have absolutely no knowledge of programming and was able to easily read the material and understand it. The graphics are also great. I would recommend this book to anyone.

I do recommend reading "HTML 4.01 Weekend Crash Course" if you already own it. The copy I bought and read is copyright 2000. The title might be changed to something like "HTML and related activities" as it covers considerably more than just HTML. That seems necessary to me. It would be a problem not presenting the other topics. This book does an admirable job of covering that amount of material in the 30 sessions meant to be read during a weekend. There are spots that are a little rough. It hints of being a first edition that would benefit from editing. I would wait for the next version, as there is some dated material that is only going to become more of a problem. Having said that I benefited from having read the book after having taken web design and web programming courses. I recommend reading this book (the new version) to prepare for such courses in order to take better advantage of them.

This book took me from knowing absolutely nothing about HTML to being able to create a basic web page. It was very clear about using text and basic graphics. The CD-ROM included the code covered in the book as well as .gifs and .jpgs to practice with. After completing this book I was able to move on to more advanced HTML as well as JavaScript with a good understanding of the basics. I would recommend this book to anybody who has no prior knowledge of HTML, although I would suggest they take a little more time than a weekend to learn it.

If you're looking to get up and running with HTML, and have no prior experience, this is a great book. You'll be introduced to the basics with an approach that gives you the confidence to learn web design. Topics are arranged in a sensible order, and the overall tone of the book is straightforward and won't fighten off a beginner by plunging headlong into a lot of jargon. This book is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in learning HTML.

First of all, it is out of date.
And, it is not enough for a developer to learn how to use XML in J2EE environment. Yes, it does have some sample code, but not enough.

The book covers a wide range of XML technologies and its implementations in Java. Most of the examples/patterns discussed in the book apply equally well or can be easily adapted for non-J2EE Java application.
Some examples use depreciated APIs, some use APIs that no longer exist in latest packages. It's not a big problem and equivalents usually can be easily found. Just be aware how fast the technologies are evolving.

Java and XML have a great synergy, they marry together to create a "Write once, run anywhere" with a "platform independent data" paradigm. The nice thing about this is that you can keep the service interface relatively stable (e.g. use XML document instead of a specific data structure). But often what people overlook is, if you choose not to expose/distribute your data model directly (using classic data structure/class), then you have to expose/distribute the meta data of the data model (in XML world, this is called schema). Once the schema is changed (as you change in the data structure/class), you are pretty much facing the same problem as in the classic data model, the communicating parties have to know what is changed and change (the parsing rule at least) accordingly. Particularly, in the internal system, the benefit of using XML interface is dramatically reduced.

The authors of book are trying to push every data model in the interface by using XML document, even the data persistence, along with various X-technologies. That is a very "dangerous mind" if not done carefully, since XML is not a panacea in design and development. Even in modeling data, XML is not one size fit all. So when is it a good idea to use XML for your data? The following is that I quoted from Ted Neward's blog,

When your data is naturally hierarchical to begin with
When exchange with foreign platforms (which is to say, platforms not native to what you're currently authoring in) is important
When pre-existing tool support (XSLT, XML viewers, import/export utilities, etc) is of paramount importance

As you can see, there are some constraints before you decide to go with XML. Not mentioning the performance overhead. Though authors mentioned that designers need to justify the usage of XML by various criteria, but this is a book about promoting XML. :) Don't be trapped.

Overall, the book contains some useful information about various XML related technologies, particularly the chapter 5 "User Interface Development" (which is quite funny for a server side development book). And the information is too general or shallow to be useful in the real world development, you need to dig more into the technology by yourself from this introduction.

There are some examples showing how the concept could be working in the real world. But they are very rudimentary. Some specs the authors used (e.g. JAX-RPC) are already upgraded or changed. As a book on such popular topics regarding J2EE and XML, it sets the bar too low.

This book gives you a very well-organized and informative tour of what's happening in the XML arena, the problem is this particular area of technology already so wide and so fast-expanding it's very difficult to get into the deep details of all areas, but the authors have done an excellent job of choosing the right technologies of tomorrow and delving into the details of those with sufficient background-story and code examples; in fact I would have given this book 5 stars if it didn't waste the first 40 so pages on explaining the client-server and peer-to-peer architectures and some extremely basic/boring J2EE and other generic topics, which has no place in a techy book like this. I would urge the reader to skip thru Ch. 1 in 4 minutes and dive right into the next ones, which are really very well written.

Beginners may use this book as an invaluable reference, intermediate level developers should only look into area of their interest, even advanced developers might find a few topics of their interest. Some of the topics the authors had to cover in a hurry, I'll say they have done a very good job in taking one specific feature and dissecting it, for example which discussing JSPs, the book lists a working example of JSP tag and explains it well, I'll say overall, the book is very well balanced between providing theoretical and background information on XML technologies and providing actual implementation examples. And yes, they did not miss out on the design patterns which are useful in this context!

Errata
page# 144: Boolean (instead of boolean) has been listed as a primitive type.

The title of this book tells the story, except that it should probably include the word "Overview". It is an easy read that provides solid information, but it is by no means a reference. It offers a nice, quick description of several aspects of Java and XML development, but I kept waiting for the meat. If you are new to XML in Java, this book will bring you up to speed on the APIs and uses of XML.

It starts with a review of J2EE architecture and XML development, which is helpful because the authors' perspective on these topics sets the stage for how they suggest using XML in a J2EE project. It covers the various XML-related Java APIs (JAXP, JAXM, etc.), and these are the parts that I found most useful. It also discusses some architectural options, which I expected to be quite helpful, but they needed more detail and discussion.

Sean M Burke has written the RTF Pocket Guide, The RTF Cookbook and other technical materials on the Rich Text Format (RTF). These writings are worthwhile, and should be mandatory reading for anyone attempting to program RTF readers or writers.
In my case, I needed to produce neat, printable reports from an Excel application written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). (It is not commonly known that many Visual Basic features are not supported in VBA, including the ones I required for my output.) After some research, I concluded that adding an RTF writer to my application would produce a quality product with limited additional programming.

Microsoft's RTF Specification version 1.9 is NOT the place to learn RTF. It is very complete, but anything but a text book. Sean M Burke's writings brought me from the stage of RTF novice to an adequate programmer of complicated financial tables in short order. Thank you, Sean.
Robert J Lambird

This book saved me A LOT of time. I had to use PHP to write an RTF document with style definitions to be used in Word and Adobe InDesign. I spent a ton of time searching the web for tutorials or tips, but they were all complicated and incomplete. I also tried going through the source code of MS Word documents trying to figure out how it was written. After a lot of frustration, I found this book. It's short and easy to read and understand. It gives you the basics on how to construct an RTF file with code that is clean, easy to read, and easy to debug. It was just what I needed. I can't beleive there isn't any tutorial like this available on the web. I did still have to look at the MS Word code to fix a couple of things, and I also used an online reference to figure out some of the more obscure codes, but overall this book was very helpful. I recommend it.

I would have to agree with the reviewers that stated that this book is more of an introduction to RTF than a reference guide. While certain parts of the book such as part on Tables were helpful, there were some glaring deficiencies.
For example, regarding Sections the author states: "Sections are not discussed elsewhere in this book, because they only come up in certain formatting features that are beyond the scope of this condensed guide. The only notable exceptions are page header settings and newspaper columns." (pgs. 54, 55)
I believe this is a miopic view of Sections. Sections are used anywhere you need to create a physical or logical break in the documentation. Headers, footers, and newspaper columns are only a few of the potential uses for Sections. We are currently using continuous Sections to hide/show selected text blocks to customize our documentation based upon user selections. In fact, I bought this book specifically to learn more about Sections, but have since returned to digesting the RTF 1.5 spec. on the subject.

There was more introductory and expository material in the book than I would have expected for a pocket guide weighing in it only a scant 150 pages. In addition, the reference I would have expected, which would allow me to navigate an RTF exported from Word, I did not find.

I recommend this to anyone who has some experience working with RTF and who wants to try to actually understand it. For those looking for an RTF decoder ring, you won't find it here.

RTF Pocket Guide is an extremely useful guide to RTF and makes for much better and faster reading than Microsoft's RTF specs. As the book itself points out, it is an introductory guide and does not discuss parsing RTF documents as well as it does creating them. It gave me the information I needed to create programs to write database data out as RTF and certainly does a great job of explaining syntax and constructs.

As mentioned in other reviews, however, the editing for the July 2003 first edition is simply awful. A number of obvious errors exist in the initial sections. The overall content is so good that these errors are all the more glaring: How could an editor read the text and not catch them? If you treat these errors as opportunities to test your own growing knowledge of RTF syntax, they are actually kind of fun to find... but not what you would expect in a reference text. I have not found any obtuse errors; most are obvious as soon as you read them.

Overall: well worth the money, but also an imperfect tool at best.

This book comes with a CD chock full of templates ready to use, right out of the box. While I don't believe in using pre-designed templates as is, it certainly is a great way to get your creative mind moving in the right direction. Pick a template, take the pieces you like from it and create your own specialized design.

Chapters one and two begin with some very basic information on HTML coding. It gives the code and then a pictorial example of what the code does. Chapters three through seven provide information about when and where to use the templates in that chapter and then shows the pictures of what each will look like. Chapter eight explains DHTML, CCS, Layers, SSI and CGI with detailed coding examples.

An eight-page index and a five page content section allows the user to find the exact piece of information for which they are looking. AND as and added benefit, they are easier to use and locate what you want than looking in the Yellow Pages!

I would recommend this book to anyone who designs webs and has "writer's block" now and again. This covers just about every designer I know so be sure to add this to your "must have" library.

In theory, a great book, in practice-don't waste your money

This book is totally outdated with 2-dimentional examples. Maybe nice for a beginner, not for (semi)professionals.

   What impressed me most about this book when I picked it up was the display of sample Web pages on the front and back covers, on the fold-out at the back of the book, and on many of its pages. By thumbing through this book the reader will find a variety of templates for every need and occasion, including brochures, business plans, calendars, catalogs, directories, forms, guest books, press releases, reports, schedules, surveys, and more. The CD that accompanies the book, which operates on both Windows and Mac platforms, provides the HTML source code and a graphic image of each template, providing a clear understanding of what the final page could look like. Readers are also encouraged to experiment. I'm currrently working on a Website and will combine several templates from this book to produce hybrid-designed Web pages. The possibilities are almost endless!

     The book features chapters offering helpful instruction on matters as HTML tagging, the use of forms, frames, and graphics. The CD also provides some popular HTML editors so that readers can get started immediately on their way to creating terrific Web pages. While the book does not offer CGI scripts for use with the guest books and forms offerred, it does offer readers with a solid starting point from which they can set up shop. This book and CD package serves as an effective tool for fast, professional results that will also offer helpful instruction and guidance on how to design state-of-the-art Websites and pages.

     I was somewhat hesitant about offering my brief review of this book to the world. Considering the great help this book would be to a budding Website developer such as myself, I realized I could lose business to someone else who would read my review, go out and buy the book, and then go into business for themselves! However, my commitment to offering reviews of good books that would benefit other members of the Internet community stands unwavering. I'm putting this book to use for myself. You should too!

I think the intention of the author is to provide a ready-to-use set of templates rather than designing readers designing their own. The book teaches about tables and frames, which are necessary knowledge for the reader to be able to customise the templates to suit their purpose. The book is divided into few sections according to categories of web page layouts for various purpose. The numerous illustrations help the own see what are layouts are available in the CD-ROM and thus reduces the effort to search for appropriate or desired template.

The book is rather outdated and mentions HTML 3.2. Now many people are delving to HTML 4, XHTML or even XML.

If you expect this book to be teaching web design, this book will not match that expectation. If you are looking for new stuff in scripting such as HTML 4, XHTML and XML, this book does not have any of that.

But if you are looking for some ready to use layouts/templates, then perhaps this book will be of some use to you. But as it is rather outdated, you shouldn't be paying the full price but a discounted rate. Quite worth it only if you can get it at a low, low price. I managed to get an unused copy at $4.85, and it was the last copy in the shop.

If you are serious about web design, you should consider looking for books that teach you how to use Macromedia Dreamweaver.

This is entitled "Quick Reference" for a reason - it's just a reference. Don't try to use this to learn XML from scratch. It's not bad as a reference, but not superb either. I wouldn't highly recommend it, but if you need something that's inexpensive, small, and covers the basics, this would work for you.

I like the price, but this book is really only good for looking up things that you already understand. I certainly was not able to understand what an XML entity is from this book.

I disagree: this book is very useful. Of course, I have several, more comprehensive XML references, but this is a lightweight companion to the heavier books, and I use it all the time to look things up quickly. Unless you've completely memorized XML (have you?), it can be very convenient. It's like an abridged dictionary.

I would not recommend this book for anyone who is starting to learn XML. This book is very difficult to read unless you are already familiar with XML terminology. If you are already familiar with XML terminology, then you don't need to read this book.

This book is worth buying for the step-by-step instructions on how to write any type of DTD alone. The descriptions and examples of attributes, elements, entities, and character entities are useful as well. I was surprised to see a fair amount of space devoted to XML developments, such as with Java, Perl, style sheets, and more--but it's there. I recommend this quick reference as a starter or a companion to some of the larger XML books on the market.

I have found Ms. Williamson's XML reference book to be useful whenever I have any questions. It has been easy to find the answers and a great help.

The book XML: The Complete Reference has been of great use to me. I had taken a class on web sites and document designs, for my company, and the class used XML: The Complete Reference as a guide. I thought that Ms. Williamson did an excellant job creating a guide and reference book for XML. I use it whenever I have any questions while using XML. It has been wonderful and a great help.

I found XML: The Complete Reference to be a worthy book to have in my library. You will not learn everything there is to know about XML in this book, but you will be able to understand it well enough to begin. I have used this book over and over to look up little things that need. It is sometimes dificult to find what you are looking foor. But I have put tabs in my book to help me. If you program in XML, you will use this book everyday. This is a must have!

This book is very useful and well written. The topics covered include XML basics, DTD's, style sheets, XML schemas, XML Query, XHTML, SYMM and MIL. It describes each topic in detail and with examples. Some of the examples help understand the different error messages given by the validating parsers. Perhaps that is the part programmers are mostly interested in.

Topics like XML Query and RDF are out of date as of now (Sept 2002), due to new W3C specifications, but introduction provided in the book is still useful for getting started. I really like XML Query chapter because no other small introduction is available elsewhere as of now.

This book is an excellent choice to get started with XML. It has got all the basics and nice examples.

We have been using this book as a Training manual and reference book for all of our classes in XML. It is very thorough and contains all the information anyone will need to be able to get started with XML programming. I think that MS Williamson has done a great job of putting together a lot of information in a book that can be used by people of different levels of knowledge and expertise.

I am a beginning web designer as i was assigned by the church i work at to pick up books and learn how to make a website. I bought this book after deciding to follow through a roadmap series, provided by apress publishers, that i found on the back of Beginning CSS Web Development, which by the way is a great book for those wanting to learn CSS and enjoy doing so. Simon Collison is very entertaining and knows how to properly instruct and teach you in the arts of CSS web development.

Maybe i should have read Sas Jacobs Beginning XML with DOM and Ajax before reading Simon Collison because after reading Simon's book first i was very disappointed in Sas Jacobs way of teaching XML. This book is full of theory which isn't necesarily a bad thing, but it also shoots code out there and half the time there is no explanation as to where it came from. XML isn't applied very well to web development in this book so if you are looking for ways to tie XML into web design don't expect much out of this book.

I guess what i'm trying to say is that this book isn't going to get you going asap into utilizing XML in your dreamweaver program or Flash CS3. I would like to compare this book as a very borring Junior level college lecture class. the kind of class that forces you to go out and learn stuff on your own.

The book impliments different coding techniques and languages to impliment with XML such as CSS and XSLT and Javascript. There is a whole chapter on CSS which isn't bad but i had also already read a book on CSS so i was ready to go, but the XSLT chapters were quite dreadful. I had no clue what was going on or how to properly form an XSLT stylesheet. Its something that i'll have to look at on my own from other sources. The book showed examples of things you could do with XSLT rather than show you how to write XSLT.

I really wish the book wouldn't waste so much time on code that isn't going to work on cross browsers. Jacobs repeatedly will show you an example that will work on IE 6 but wont work on Mozilla or Opera or Safari. Or it will work on Mozilla and not the others. Either way it just seems like she could give you the examples that work on all of them and then say if you do it this way it won't work on these browsers because... there never really is much of an explanation.

The plus in the book is that Sas Jacobs does know what she is talking about. She gets too indepth for having the book labeled as "Beginning XML". So maybe they could have picked a better title for the book and it would be alright. The book is more intended for those wanting to expound on XML beings it is a Metalanguage and has a vast amount of capabilities. Its a book for those who are very intuitive when it comes to coding. People that are good problem solvers and already have a web portfolio started. Its a book for people that are not me, and thats someone that is looking how to build a dynamic website from scratch with no prior experience in web design and web development.

So if you are a beginner looking to pick up on XML watch out for this book. Maybe try somewhere else. The book will give you a good lecture on XML and will help you understand XHTML better as well as a few other languages, but you won't be utilizing XML very well any time soon.

Other books i own and have read and would recomend to beginnig web designers:

"The essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP" -good book.
"Beginning CSS Web Development from Novice to Professional" -great choice buy it.
"Foundation Actionscript Animation" -great book.
"Learning ActionScript 3.0" -good book.

Being a developer who uses XML extensively but for very specific applications I was interested in reading this book to help expand my understanding of XML-specific issues as they relate to Ajax and the browser environment.

I feel that Sas has accomplished her mission in giving a very thorough overview of the topic of XML. This book was very well written, clear and concise. Of particular interest to me were the examples of developing with XSLT, using the CSS functionality and developing in tandem with server side scripting. I thought the examples were relevant and the sections that were shorter led me to other resources where I might continue my explorations in depth. I prefer that the author accomplish the stated task and leave deeper explorations for other books - I felt that what was covered was perfect for the length of the book and gave me the information I was looking for based on the title. Interestingly, it's one of those books that I really did read from cover to cover. A rare event for me with computer books.

This is an excellent book for those who are looking to expand their use of XML in development projects for the browser.

The book barely touches XML, and when it does, it keeps comparing it to XHTML. In fact, a lot of examples are about XHTML (and I thought this book was about XML). There aren't any real-world examples in how to use XML, just theoretical talk on ideas of use. I can understand that XHTML is the marriage of HTML and XML, but does the book have to use more examples of XHTML than explaining what XML is? Obviously I was still lost about the use of XML. The book also covers formatting XML with CSS, for presenting XML in certain formatting light. Um, isn't that what XHTML is for? Presentation? I know XML is for holding data, even configuration files, but this book doesn't even introduce you to such ideas, nor does it explore those type of concepts. Just more focus on presenting XML as a displayable document in the web browser (XHTML anyone?) I found myself skimming pages until I reached the end, and felt ripped-off. I was also lost on the whole idea of using namespaces for XML, which the book did a good job of not explaining the use of it in real-world scenarios. Do yourself a favor and stay away from this book.

This book is excellent as an introduction to XML as used in web development. Whether you've been using XML for data storage but would like to take it to the next level, or haven't ever used XML, this book is a must-read. It doesn't tell you everything you need to know, but it gets you started and tells you how you can find out the rest on the Web. Its countless examples are all well explained.

I use Professional Ajax by Zakas, McPeak, and Fawcett along with it. If one book may leave a question the other has the answers.

This book tries to do too much and falls down on many accounts. The two chapters on XSLT left me wondering what in the world was going on. Jacobs provides examples of how to use XSLT, but fails to explain how the code really works.

The examples are very contrived. For instance, Jacobs shows how to use PHP to retrieve a result set from a MySQL database. Then, we see convoluted steps to convert the data into XML. Then we have to write XSLT to manipulate the XML. It would be much more efficient and practical to use PHP's object-oriented MySQL capabilities to spit the results into XHTML, or use PHP's own DOM capabilities to manipulate the XML.

This book simply fails because it tries to cover too much information in its short length, and also due to the many weak, impractical examples throughout. To sum it up, it's all examples and no substance.