Markup Languages Books

There is very little of value in this book that shouldn't be posted on Oracle's web site as a tutorial or whitepaper. It is expectedly Oracle centric, but only covers their products in a very broad manner without much meat. For example, Chapter 4: "Developing for an Oracle Application" is only 16 pages and simply provides definitions for the variety of Oracle-side web apps/extensions.

If you really want to buy an Oracle XML book, then get the O'Reilly "Oracle XML Applications". Now there's a 5* book.

If you've ever tried understanding Oracle's XML offering from the technet documentation, you've probably given up in despair, as the information is available, but it's totally disorganised.

Unfortunately, this book suffers the same problems. Many of the examples can be found on technet, and the organisation is no better. Like many Oracle Press books, this layout is poor, and the examples are either superficial or non-existent.

Instead, try Steve Muench's "Oracle XML Applications." It's superb.

There is very little of value in this book that shouldn't be posted on Oracle's web site as a tutorial or whitepaper. It is expectedly Oracle centric, but only covers their products in a very broad manner without much meat. For example, Chapter 4: "Developing for an Oracle Application" is only 16 pages and simply provides definitions for the variety of Oracle-side web apps/extensions.

If you really want to buy an Oracle XML book, then get the O'Reilly "Oracle XML Applications". Now there's a 5* book.

There are several problems with this book. One is that very little coverage is given to the Oracle XML SDK. I could not find useful documentation on TechNet regarding use of the XML SDK via PL/SQL. I had hoped that this book would provide examples of SDK and a more complete set of documentation. To my disappointment, this book does not provide much more than an overview.

The other problem with this book is that it was written with examples for Oracle Application Server, which has been replaced by iAS. Bottom line, this book reads like it was written for the first release of Oracle's XML SDK. Your better off on TechNet and the newsgroups.

The book provides an overview of XML from Oracle's standpoint. Chapter one is a basic introduction to XML itself, but from that point onwards it is more about how Oracle integrates XML into its products & how you might use them to put together a technology solution.

If you are already vaguely familiar with what Oracle offer, then there this is a good starting point to determine how to solve problems using their fairly extensive toolset. Then you will probably want to purchase another title that focuses more upon the individual tools you choose.

This is an actual excerpt from page 544: "Similarly, an output specification language may be associated with a recurring negotiation problem (or class of negotiation problems) as a way of describing that only agreements allowed by this language may be considered valid output for any specific problem instance belonging to the recurring negotiation problem."

This was a bad book when it was published almost 6 years ago. Now it is bad and out of date.

This is obviously a book where the authors commited themselves to writing a certain number of pages and then, half-way into the work they realized that didn't have enought material to cover it. The totally useless 100-page poorly-commented pre-release Java source code for a DOM-implementation in chapter 10 is a particularily good example of this.

Another horrible chapter is chapter 11, which contains an explataion of user interface interaction that is so overly abstract but still so extremely stupid that I've used that particular chapter as an example of how a really useless book should be written.

Also, early in the book the author explains that the book is amed towards rpogrammers. It's interesting to see that they hardly ever back their examples up with and source code at all.

In short. Don't buy this book.

This is obviously a book where the authors commited themselves to writing a certain number of pages and then, half-way into the work they realized that didn't have enought material to cover it. The totally useless 100-page poorly-commented pre-release Java source code for a DOM-implementation in chapter 10 is a particularily good example of this.

Another horrible chapter is chapter 11, which contains an explataion of user interface interaction that is so overly abstract but still so extremely stupid that I've used that particular chapter as an example of how a really useless book should be written.

Also, early in the book the author explains that the book is amed towards rpogrammers. It's interesting to see that they hardly ever back their examples up with and source code at all.

In short. Don't buy this book.

I was looking for a clean and concise approach to XML. Instead I got the impression that this book was just an excuse for the author to squeeze in as much minutia on SGML as he thought he could get away with.

It does give good background on XML along with a mind numbing amount of hype.

Look elsewhere for a good introduction to using XML.

It's a pretty decent indication of the potential of the XML document/messaging structure, but lacks significant insight into designing any type of formal business application.

Most of the book relies heavly on perl scripts for message processing. I wish some attention was directed at VB/ASP or CGI for message processing.

With few XML books on the market, I would recommend this book, as it provides a good insight of the potential of XML.

The chapters in the book are well organized. Detailed explanation about XML, application development is given. The book in the later part covers the Interoperability and SOAP applications.

This book explains in detail about the XML basics and gives a clear idea about XML programming. The examples give good understanding of what is required. As one reads on at later parts, the code is a bit difficult to understand. The code is discussed in VB, ASP and in .NET framework. I suggest this book for one who is working with .NET framework and similar technologies. As the book is published by Microsoft Press, more emphasis is on Microsoft approach in programming.

I agree with the previous reviewer who describes this as a "rushed-to-press contentless tome". I bought this book because other recent MS Press volumes are so good (Richter, Petzold). This one, however, has more in common with the slapdash Wrox junk with the yearbook covers. Specifically, what you'll find in this book is a poorly written, high-level, already out-of-date overview of various XML-related technologies. If, by some weird chance, you're actually looking for information on, oh, "XML Programming," -- code snippets aside, it just isn't in here. I don't know what the reviewer who said it got him/her "up to coding quickly" is talking about. The book in fact has little to do with programming. Finally, I note that the lead author's bio mentions that he has authored 12 technical books. Lord preserve us from these jargon-spewing, dozen-tome-authoring hacks, and God bless the likes of Charles Petzold, who has written two books on programming in 20 years -- two elegant classics. It's time that tech publishers require a great deal more of their authors. It isn't enough to know how to code or yatter in techspeak. If you're writing a book, shouldn't you know how to... write?

The authors apparently made too many assumptions on the readers. They freely used buzzwords without giving any proper definition, and they used half a dozen different terms for the same concept, even on the same page. Take a look at this excerpt in Chap-1:

The are two categories of XML documents. A document is either "well-formed" or "valid". A document can be well-formed only if it obeys the syntax of XML. A document that includes sequences of markup characters that cannot be parsed or are invalid cannot be well-formed.

What the heck is the "syntax of XML" and "sequences of markup characters"? what does "cannot be parsed" means?

The authors seem to be in a big hurry to give any explanation.

The book is also full of geekspeak and long, ornate marketing stuff that bores intermediate and advanced readers, yet confuses beginners.

Wanna buy the book? forget it. Even if some friend gives it you, don't waste your time on it.

I wish somebody had advised me beforehand.

I gave it 1-star, only because amazon has no option for a minus 5 star.

I normally refrain from recommending Microsoft Press books because so many of them are printed versions of their online help or MSDN content. If you want to learn XML from the ground up, this book isn't for you. If you're familiar with the concepts of XML and have wanted more clarification on how to use XML as a tool within your applications, then you should look at this book.

It does offer decent explanations of XML and XML technology, and it does offer examples in VB, C++, and Java, but code itself isn't well documented.

There is mention of the .Net Framework and Visual Studio .Net, but the book was obviously written before either of them went "gold", so don't expect to see examples of XML Web Services using .Net.

All in all, its a good reference book and worth looking into getting (as long as you don't pay full retail price for it.)

XML Programming was nearly the best book on XML programming I have found. Here are the pluses.
1) It does a very good job of taking you through the basics fast and gets into specifics of coding quickly. It walks you through the process of building real applications using XML as their foundation.
2) The book covers more than the Microsoft angle. It does show some Linux and Java examples, although it definitely emphasizes the Microsoft solutions.

The reason I didn't rate this book higher was one thing that just kept annoying me throughout the book. It reads like they took an old book and threw in some material on newer XML specifications and Microsoft products, without updating the older material. Some examples of this are
1) They talk about the MSXML parser, but the last version they cover is 3.0 (even though 4 is included on the accompanying CD) and MSXML 4 has been out for quite some time, certainly longer than .NET. Yet there are entire chapters covering .NET and mentions of it throughout the book (mostly regarding Beta 2).
2) They show XML Notepad as an editor. Microsoft has discontinued the XML Notepad and the link in the book goes to a page that no longer exists.
3) Other links in the book do not exist and the tools have been renamed and thereby are harder to find on Microsoft's site.

The other primary minus for me was the author's assumption regarding your programming background. The authors use Visual Basic, ASP, Java, SQL and C++ without always explaining the code (Java and C++ are in the minority; VB, ASP and SQL are widespread). Most of the people reading this may not be familiar with all of these languages and thereby get a little lost in some of the examples.

So, if you're already comfortable with Microsoft programming and want to get up to speed quickly on XML, I would say this book is worth your while, but be ready for web links that don't work and check the products they refer to for newer versions.

If you're not comfortable with SQL and VB at a minimum, start there and then come back to this one or a similar title.

I was skeptical about a book just on this subject. I was right. There is no real insight here. Don't waste your time or money/

Contrary to other reviewers, this site does exist.

This book promises to "take all the hassle out of implementing web menus, in whatever style and technology you wish". It doesn't deliver.

First, I would have expected more about what a "usable Web menu" is. The twelve rules and the brief section on information architecture are pedestrian. The authors recommend usability testing but don't give test results for their own designs. The authors mention "the excellent book 'Web Site Usability'" and then violate its emprically determined recommendations. Rule 2, "Menus must be distinct from content", is a case in point. It contradicts an observation from "Web Site Usability": that "Navigation and content are inseparable".

Second, I would have expected "hooks" between the usability section (design) and the technical section (implementation). The usability section ends on p. 53, and the technical section, which continues for another 150 pages, makes few references to it.

Third, I would have expected suggestions for basic, universally accepted, HTML-only menus. The authors illustrate Rule 12, "Menus must work on multiple browsers", by showing what a fancy graphical menu reduces to in Lynx, the text-only Web browser. Lynx is never heard from again, and every example in the book requires JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, Flash, or, worse yet (for other reasons), server-side scripting.

Fourth, I would have expected information about accessibility. Rule 11, "Menus must be accessible to the handicapped", suffers from outdated diction and a total lack of coverage. The rule is introduced on pp. 31 - 32 but never mentioned again. "Accessiblity" isn't even in the index. Due to heavy use of JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, and Flash, the examples in the book are not accessible. (Incidentally, Web accessibility is often a legal requirement. Any project involving federal money must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.)

Fifth, I would have expected a more professional approach. The tone of the book is informal and sloppy. Sometimes, this covers up the authors' laziness. For example, it's easier to mention an information source (like "Web Site Usability" or the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and call it "excellent" or "eye-opening" than it is to actually read the material, quote from it, and use it.

"Constructing Usable Web Menus" is a diappointment. I'm glad I borrowed it from the library instead of buying it.

The companion website for this book, www.glasshaus.com, where you are supposed to be able to go and download the code samples, is no longer in existence.

Aimed at intermediate to advanced developers, "Constructing Usable Web Menus" homes in on what works, and what doesn't when designing menus for the Web. Chock full of copious amounts of code and screenshots, the book offer a good, albeit incomplete, overview of available menu options for webmasters and guidelines for effective menu design.

The book is one of the first in a series of how-tos from Glasshaus, a new imprint from Wrox Press. This new series is designed to teach "web professional to web professional" and is slanted towards the more proficient practioners of the craft.

The first two chapters of the 227 page book offer guidelines for good menu design (rules, info architecture) while the final four chapters show how to create various types of menus through JavaScript, DHTML, Flash, and PHP/MySQL to populate client-side menus.

The first part of the book deals primarily with usability and information architecture. Here's a list of the "12 Rules for Web Menu Usability" from the first chapter:

1. Menus must be considerate of the user's main task
2. Menus must be distinct from content
3. Menus must be clearly readable
4. Menus must be easily scanned for information
5. Menus must be easily operated
6. Menus must behave as your target user would expect
7. Menus must load quickly as possible
8. Menus must be consistent across a site
9. Menus must put a higher premium on usability than branding
10. Menus must be localizable
11. Menus must be accessible to the handicapped
12. Menus must work on multiple browsers

All good advice. On the last point the authors do an admirable job, claiming their code works on most modern browsers, including IE4+, Netscape 4+, and Opera 5+ for the PC and IE4+, Netscape 6+, and Opera 5+ for the Mac. They make some good points, especially that menus be clearly readable and fast loading. I've seen many a site with slow loading, tiny text menus that are difficult to use, especially for users with older eyes or motor impairments. Designers would be well-advised to follow their guidelines.

However, the authors' coverage of menu designs is somewhat incomplete, and their research needs a refresh. They don't cover simple CSS menus that don't require JavaScript. Perhaps this was because they decided to include Netscape 4 among their target browsers. They also cite Miller's 1956 7+-2 paper, then say it is out of date, but offer no more recent data on the limits of short term memory and menu design (Microsoft's depth versus breadth research for example).

Expandable menus are covered, but hierarchical menus get just one screen shot, from MSDN. While some may question the use of slow-loading or overly complex menus on Web sites, hierarchical menus are in use on many popular sites...Overall the book gives developers a good overview of menus on the Web, and how to create them.

This book provided an excellent orientation to the world of computer graphics. It does not overwhelm the reader new to the field with a lot of unnecessary detail. Instead it provides a much needed, readable review of the essentials. I wish I had picked up this book first, it would have saved a lot of guesswork and time.

I think This book stinks. I bought it in a store a while ago, and even now it hasn't helped one bit! I think that the author of this book should be ashamed of themselves!

I didn't like this book and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The author's ideas are flawed and the book has plenty of errors and logic problems. Overall I think this book hurt my development and design efforts more than it helped. Unless you want to end up scratching your head in confusion, I would steer clear of this one

A big waste of money... flighty, conversational tone...book really says absolutely nothing. Tons of pictures, but the author gives no real useful information. This much money would be better spent on a book specific to the imaging program you are using. A waste of shelf space.

Yes, this book may repeat some concepts from previous books, but these are merely web standards that will be repeated in every book about web design. So obviously, if you already know how to prepare web graphics, you won't find anything new in here, but it's still a great beginners guide and reference book for more advanced web developers.

As always Lynda Weinman has impeccable writing skills---she can make a somewhat tedious subject rather enjoyable and easy to deal with. And I am more than happy to have this digested version handy, even though I have the other books she's written as well.

If you just need to learn about Preparing Web Graphics, this is a good guide book. If you're looking for something more in depth in design or development, try her other books---all of which I highly recommend to designers and programmers alike.

1. It is simply not possible to program ANYTHING in XML from this book. It is so general that it is much more aptly suited to be a "what is xml?" book than a book that actually teaches you anything. If XML was a basketball game, this book would get you in the arena in the nosebleed seats, but not much more.
2. It is absolutely riddled with typos and inaccuracies. As is the norm with the Demystified Series, one-two authors have put out like 5-6 books in a 2 year span. This just means that it feels rushed and unedited. Many, many typos. For a student, it's maddening b/c the book gives up any semblance of trust that the reader has in the author. If I think there's a mistake in the book, I can truly doubt whether it's another typo or if it's me who is wrong or if the author doesn't know what he's talking about. And there is no errata section 3 years after the fact. They just want to make a quick buck.
3. It is a waste of time b/c Elizabeth Castro's book XML for the WWW written in 2000 or 2001 and I am 10 pages into it and it's already going to be light-years better. I will likely buy the 2008 version that is coming on in September 2008.
4. The majority of the books in this entire series get poor reviews and I believe that the HeadFirst series is better. They're basic but you can actually learn a few things. I think that this book doesn't make anything clearer about XML for me.

As a newbie to XML, I was really hoping to use this book for an overview of the language before diving into meatier texts; however, I found the brevity of the book to be too...brief. I spent a good deal of time looking up additional references to get a better picture of what XML can really do.

I had to stop reading this book about halfway through because there were so many things left unexplained. For example, on page 71, it states about Xlink:type that "There are two possible links: simple and extended." and procedes to briefly explain what these are. Then on page 73 there is a sample XML document containing Xlink:type="arc". So, I'm left wondering, if there are two types of Xlinks, where did "arc" come from. The answer, of course, is that there are not only two possible values for Xlink:type, but you won't find that explained in this book. If you really want to understand XML, pass this book up.

An easy weekend read that touches on a wide range of XML topics, but typos in the book confuse rather then reinforce many of the concepts.

It is a kind of book you can read in a weekend, but it will give you a good, although basic, understanding what XML is about. No previous knowledge about XML is required but some idea about HTML seems to be silently assumed as authors put phrases like "similar as in HTML" here and there, so you should at least know what a tag is (not too high requirement).
If you look for a book about programming and using XML in yor applicationlook elsewhere but if you just need to get fast some basic understanding of XML it gives a good start.
Taking into account that many computer books on web applications start with an assumption that you "have a basic understanding of XML" this book will help you to attain this level very fast.
This book will teach you something about both DTD and XML Schemas, but also about XPointer, XPath and XQuery and even how to use a Saxon parser.
So to sum it up good and fast read but very basic.

This book. Is what it is. The ideas presented are not new.
It's full of code which should have been left out of the book.
His writing style is hard to read. He goes off on tangents that make no sense.
A very bad book.

The book is kind of blur and not much indication on how to do it. It is not worth to get one actually.

XML is a critical emerging technology which has the potential to revolutionize database connectivity in enterprise software development. While the author provides knowledge about XML document design and delivery, the book falls short of providing meaningful insights to those who wish to construct integrated commercial XML/Database systems.

The writer doesn't seem to have a good idea of the history and development of these database concepts for commercial use. For example, he doesn't seem to know that Object databases have had repeated failures in terms of performance, maintainability and a host of other factors in mission critical applications.

He would have gained by referencing "Foundation for Future Database Systems: The Third Manifesto," by C.J. Date and High Darwin, and by familiarzing himself with "The Great Debate," where E.F. Cobb demonstrated how non-relational models are orders of magnitude more complex than relational models for the same problem.

As someone who has architected and developed large scale XML-based database applications, I sense that the author has come from a perspective of writing specialty XML document delivery databases for non-commercial purposes in the biotechnology industry, and provides minimal material which would be useful to anyone seeking to implement industrial strength XML databases (in an application server, for example) or to use XML messaging with relational databases (e..g., with webMethods and Rendezvous' Tibco.)

The author has a writing style which is quite chatty and unprofessional, which continually distracts from its purpose, which is to compare XML, Relational and Object database design issues. Buy this book to skim through it as a reference, but do not expect it to be of great value to many of the issues that are likely to be faced in building enterprise class databases. You can find better information of a higher quality on this subject for free by visiting [certain websites] and reading many of their XML-related articles. It may be of more value if you only wish to create XML document servers.

The author discusses some interesting topics, but I found the book far too full of vague statements about the usefulness of various ways of encoding XML and of database architecture. Similarly, the chapter on querying XML databases was enough to whet my appetite, but it was mostly on the representation of queries (useful, to be sure, but confusingly presented), had little about efficiency considerations (surely of paramount importance when discussing queries), and presented as "algorithms" methods that are so unrefined and simplistic that they're better labeled "query methodologies."

To be fair, I haven't been all that impressed with the other XML books I've been skimming...

This is a great book, very useful for programmers, database developers, students, system architects, and anyone else who wishes to effectively use, design, or build XML databases. A basic knowledge of XML and databases is assumed, and the focus of this book is on pulling them together. Some advanced techniques are described in this book and the presentation is fairly dense in those areas.

The book covers variety of topics like:
How to design a schema for an existing XML DBMS beginning with the concepts of the field being modeled and resulting in compatible schemas for XML documents, relational databases, and object-oriented applications.
How to store XML data in a relational DBMS, object-oriented DBMS, or flat files, and how to make decisions on which approach to choose.
How to design a system architecture that contains an XML database, Web server, and user applications.
How to develop a user interface for XML data accessed via a Web browser or Java application.
How to query an XML database and what algorithms support XML database querying.
How to create a native store for an XML DBMS.

I think this book is indicated for web developers. The book includes very technical information of many technologies (IE related and Netscape related). There are many cool examples and source code, Not all are fully explained.

This book is severaly outdated. The material is Netscape 4 and Internet Exploder specific. Nowhere, will users get adequate information about developing DHTML using W3C standards (DOM1, DOM2, CSS1, and CSS2). As Netscape 6, Opera 5, and Internet 5 support these new standards, any web pages developed from this book's material will not work across all browsers, and instead will be glued onto Microsoft or obsoleted versions of Netscape.

The book offers mounds of general information about HTML and HTML technology, but does not offer any code snippets to illustrate the concepts, except for the seldom few places here and there.

Towards the end of the book are dumps of source code. This is an utter waste of precious trees. This material could have just been put on the CD. There are no code walkthroughs of the material, so one wonders if the authors are going for the paid per word/page/etc.

There are those books out there that are full of fluff and are good to stuff a bookshelf in the bookstore, and then there are those books that are a rare gem of enlightenment. This book leans more towards the fluff.

At first I thought that I have bought the best book about DHTML that would launch me to a more advanced use of DHTML. But I was wrong, very wrong. The book is hard to read, the examples are never really explained from line to line and the CD-ROM is worthless. I have spent a lot of money on this book and recieved nothing. I am now thinking of buying a nother book. Although there are some usefull information in it, but not as much as I thought.

The book combines all technologies that sourround web development. It really introduce what is dhtml (not as a proprietary technology) but as a combination of a set of technologies like CSS, DOM, Javascript, etc. From the standards to the production the book also cover animation in dhtml, sound, visual effects and awesome demonstrations.

IT's cool for beginners as encouragement, and perfect for web professionals as the gold resource.

The book is said to handle about Dynamic HTML. In general lines it does, but with a lot of words around it. You can summarize the entire book in just 40 usefull pages, the rest is just not interesting, such as complete listings of DHTML-sites, WITHOUT explanation. The entire book handles to much about the history of HTML and HTML in theory. The CDROM should contain several usefull programs, but it's not worth anything either.

As I have developed my expertise in this area, I put the book down and use other resources. I end up coming back to it at a higher level.
Eg First I was interested specifically in scripting syntax, then the object model (IE3). Now I'm making sense of oleisapi servers etc through the book.

I've had this book for an entire year here at Microsoft and have yet to use it to any satisfaction. Currently it is making a good door-stop. Instead I have found much more support for vbscript in my web pages from books like Professional Active Server Pages (both 1st and 2nd versions).

Maybe I was looking for the wrong type of book, but as soon as I looked through it, I realized this book wouldn't be very helpful at all and promptly returned it. This isn'y for you if you want to do ASP.

As a programmer I have purchased dozens of books on computer languages, and this book is one of the best. I just got the book yestarday(!) and my pages are already

FILLED

with interactivity. I now have the countrol over my sites that I have always wanted. Soooo much better then my JavaScript book.

This book was printed in 1996. Just the foreward talks about the "recent release of Visual InterDev 1.0." The language syntax and the scripts used in the book are still valid, but there are many books that are much more recent which cover today's topics. This book is defenitely out-of-date!

I've read scores of computer books, including quite a few from the "Teach Yourself..." series, and can honestly say this is one of the most poorly written books of them all. I'm six chapters in and can't say I've learned anything more than what I've already gleaned from other books' brief explanations of the subject. A great deal of the book is occupied by what can only be described as "filler" examples, which are both redundant and useless at the same time.
I shall attempt to find an alternate piece of work, forthwith.
This is not the book for someone seeking to learn XML.

A great book, very thorough. Hits all the XML topics. I was very pleased.

I am a fan of the Teach Yourself series and typically enjoy and learn from these books. This one is the exception to the rule. The book, in my opinion, is poorly written. The examples are sometimes not useful and the code snippets are mediocre at best. Many are just like the tired, over-used stuff found on plenty of websites. And the websites are a lot cheaper (hint hint). Sorry, I wish I could balance this with something positive, but I was really disappointed.

Starting off, I was a bit skeptical about reading this book, as I have read a previous title by Steve Holzner on JavaScript, and was dissapointed to say the least. This book, on the other hand, is a well balanced title spread out over 21 days. It contains enough material without being oversaturated with information in any one day (or chapter), as well as giving the reader enough to absorb during the course of reading and after. This technical book does is not about injecting humor after every sentence, but about describing aspects relating to the subject or language of which the writing is about - which this book does well. I feel that the information provided in this book is straight forward and systematic to follow. Unlike certain titles, in particular certain Dummies title's (not all), I was and am not distracted by useless material and often dry humor from this title, but useful information that I need in order to make XML pages, as well as showing other aspects that support/improve upon XML's capabilities (JavaScript, Flavors of ML, .NET, etc.) without confusing the reader. The examples are easy to follow, and are broken down in an easy-to-follow manner. If you want an interesting technical book geared towards delivering knowledge about XML and it's purpose, I would recommend this book - if you want an exciting book, get an action title. Well done SAM and Mr. Holzer.

XML does not exactly make for exciting reading. It's about as dry as the Mojave Desert. But I did manage to struggle thru the first four chapters of this book. Then I gave up. This book should be retitled Teach Yourself XML in 210 Days, not 21.

The author throws a lot of code at you before you even have a grasp of what XML is all about. And the code is mostly C.I.P.U. (clear if previously understood) just like a lot of other dense programming books out there. Some authors seem to think that if you just read thru their code everything will become perfectly obvious. Not! (Eggheaded mathematicians are wont to do the same, which is why there are so few who know how to teach math.)

At then end of the fourth chapter I still had absolutely no idea what XML was good for and whether it was worth the long learning curve or not. I'm sure XML must be good for something! But if a book can't tell me within four chapters what its subject is useful for then it's not a book I can recommend. In the meantime, I will continue to search for a better XML primer, one that can at least clue me in on what the buzz is all about.