XML Books

After taking a beginning XML class where the required reading was the O'Reilly book on XML and XSLT (Learning XSLT) I had become completely frustrated with XML all together. I finally started diving through tech books to try to find something written in English and lo and behold Sams Teach Yourself book came to head.

I did have a current knowledge of XML, but this book shed light on an otherwise dim beginning for me. And the XSLT that is in this book is without a competitor when it comes to breaking down and simplyfing the methods for getting what you need layed out on the page correctly.

This book will NOT give you advanced methods such as MODE or IMAGE includes (which is a shame since these are very important); however, if you need to say, "A-HA" to creating an XML document and linking the XSLT and CSS to the file, then this is the book to pick up, jump in, then jump off into something more advanced.

I agree with the gentleman above (Mr. Sholto L. Douglas). I am 1/4 of the way into the book and I was so disappointed I just had to read the review on this book, which I should have done prior to purchasing it. However my previous experience with SAMS books had been excellent so I purchased it at a bookstore based on the publisher. I won't make that mistake again. From now on I'll purchase from Amazon AFTER reading the reviews.

As Mr. Douglas states the examples are sparse and poor. I am used to SAMS books providing many concise examples, analogies and exercises that aid in your learning. Not everyone learns best by theory.

Since I have never experienced Mr. Morrison's work my disappointment lies with SAMS. They usually put out a better product. I will return this book tomorrow. There have got to be a number of books that handle this subject better.

This is one of the worst books I have ever seen.
If not for the fact that it was bought for me, I would seriously look at returning for a refund.

Unfortunatley all I can do is recommend to the schools that I deal that we dump all purchasing of the sams 24hr series.

This book's index, and references to content is so badly done that it had to be done by kids because not even a computer would foul this up so badly.

Even the content itself is inadequate.
Yes I can learn the bare basics of XML with this book, but thats not much more than getting a brocure or similar info of the net for free.

If I had needed real XML knowledge this book wouldnt have even come close. As it is, its not even sufficent for basic knowledge. I know because I have reference material from my job that was better (even without an index on it).

I am surprised that SAMS would publish should a childish publication... My own 12 year old nephew can do a better job of proofreading & editing than the socalled professionals who did this book.

Those reviewers of this book who say its well organized need to learn to read as this book is very disorganized and virtually useless as anything but a $2 primer..
Ie; Its value is equal to a introductory primer that I have gotten in the past (litterally).

I think the bigger problem is not the author but the editors/publishers,proofreaders, who seem to be incapable of reading or scanning or verifying their own work.

I highly recommend not buying any SAMS book ever again.
Especally the 24hr series. The idea of a 24hr book should be that you can learn the subject in 24hr segments (whether clocktime or 24 steps).


An index that tells you page 134 for a item, but you find instead on page 180, or even the endofchapter stuff where it tells you to grab data from another chapter but its acutally yet somewhere else (a different chapter than specified).

I wouldnt consider paying more than $2-$5 for any 24hr sams book, because you will not get your $ value out of it.

I am happy though that I have been successfull in having several schools cancel current and all future dealings with sams 24hr series... Successfully eliminating at least a nice chunk of profit for 'incompetent editors/proofreaders'.


I do wish to point out to anybody considering this book...there are much better books for the same or better price than this.
Again if you must buy this book, get it cheap, say maybe $5 or less, that way you wont feel as ripped off.

scratching your head so much trying to figure this book out then ENJOY! In 24 hours you too can have all the confusion of XML as you when you strarted the book + be a bald! (at no extra charge to you)

I will have to say if you are interested in reading a book about writing xml code about writing xml code. Then this is perfect for you.

Confused? yeh me too... you'd think if someone spent the time to write a book about writing XML code they might would throw you a few more examples of how the actual code is written rather than spending the whole book talking about the history of XML.

I sort of feel like I could tell you anything about XML; how it started, the cool people who could use XML, I could even tell you what XML wore to SGML's birthday party last year. I couldn't tell you how to write the code sadly enough.

What's good: a quick summary of major XML technologies, including DTDs, schemas, XSL, SAX, DOM, and more. This book tells briefly what each does, and gives some idea of how the pieces fit together.

What's not: there's not nearly enough here to get a programmer going on a real XML project.

This may help a beginner get a quick, high-level idea of what the big pieces are and how they fit together. Don't expect to get any real work done once you've read it, though.

//wiredweird

I haven't clue what this book is about and how it relates to real life problem solving. I use SAX2 and DOM parsers daily and they are an integral part of my software projects. I fond this book to be a total waste of time and money and I would not, could not recommend it. The O'Reilly Book on the other hand it a gem

Modern XML programmers should be using the SAX and DOM api's for their projects, and the related standards. Those subjects should have been the foundation for this book.

Instead the author spends lots of time talking about some "pyxie" utility that reforms XML into some intermediate line oriented ascii format for processing. He even does system calls to assist in processing. If SAX and DOM didn't exist, then yes, I suppose this is how you'd do it. This would be OK for 10% of the book, as an introduction, but not as the primary tool.

To be fair, he does talk about SAX and DOM in a couple chapters. The coverage was light and the examples weren't great.

And no discussion of XSLT or XPath? Nor of schemas? To be fair the copyright says 2000, so this may have been written in 1999, so some of those items were not around or popular back then. But if the book is updated, these would need to be added.

I think readers might do better to grab one of the Java books for now, and try to translate to Python in their head I guess. I agree with one of the other reviewers that there's a bit of filler in the book, though not as bad as some other books.

On the plus side the author is very polite and supportive and would be comforting to newer programmers.

I also like the way he keeps extending his xgrep project to have more and more features; it is nice to see an author show a large project evolving (I just kept wishing it was using DOM).

There are some useful nuggets in this book, but there is also a lot of material that doesn't directly relate to processing XML. The author spends an inordinate amount of space discussing things like AWK, filename globbing on Windows, installing software, and other irrelevant items. The software tools used as examples in the book were written for earlier versions of Python and the Python XML libraries; they do not work with the current releases of Python and PyXML, and no updates are available on the author's web site.

This book proves that a good publisher makes a difference, and that prentice hall does not qualify. I've never seen a computer book that contains so many errors. Combined with the hideous layout of the goldfarb series, this should be enough to keep you far away from it. BTW: i've added a second star, because valuable stuff is hidden in it; you just have to work too hard to get there.

If you're new to python, buy learning python and programming python instead. if you want to apply xml with python, use the web to learn more. Only buy this book if it's *deeply* discounted, or if you're looking for job as a book editor. Otherwise, you'll end up rewarding incompetent publishing.

Very little coverage of processing XML documents using Python - plenty of discussion of Python generally, how to use C language utilities to parse XML, how to use awk to modify the output of the C language tools, etc. The book uses a large typeface and includes examples for both Linux and Windows NT screen input/output (which turn out to be nearly identical), so there's not nearly as much content as you might imagine from the page count. I'm relatively new to XML and Python and I spotted two errors in the examples within the first 100 pages. There are two appendices which sound like they're supposed to explain Python to Java and Perl programmers but turn out to be feature comparisons. That's great fodder for flamewars about language superiority, but not a big help for people with experience in other languages seeking a Python jump-start. People who shell out $() for a book on XML and Python don't need a sales pitch about why XML and Python are good choices.

I think this book could have been saved with some help from a good editor; unfortunately, that wasn't done. I can't comment on the CD as I haven't opened its envelope, as this book is being returned as totally unsatisfactory, which I don't do very often.

I borrowed this book from my new team lead, since he wants me to do some XML work on his project. I have absolutely zero experience with XML (or HTML), and I saw this book on his shelf so I borrowed it, hoping it would give me a clue as to what I'm supposed to do for the next few weeks. I am shocked at how little I know after completing the first two chapters! Each two pages is a new concept - which I think is a great idea. But, after you follow along with the examples, there is no description/pic of how it should look in your web browser! How do I know if I'm doing it correctly if I don't have anything to verify it with? It's kind of like reading a programming book that never shows you what the execution of the program is supposed to look like - that's ridiculous! Also, the lessons explain the "what" to do, but not the "why," which is really frustrating when you're trying to REALLY learn something - not just fake your way through it. Stay away from this book. I bet there is a free tutorial on the web that is much better.

Horrible book out there for learning XML. Lack of imagination on the part of the authors leads to same, mind-numbing, utterly useless example being used throughout the book.

Can use the book for a quick glance at the XML syntax though, but don't expect to learn anything from the book.

No wonder the book sells for less than $2, and is worth only that much.

As with all of the visual blueprint book, this is a good reference for those new to XML. I found it easy to reference with. However if you need more explanation, then pick Microsoft step by step or SAMS 24 hours book.

I'm new to XML. My knowledge is fairly limited. And yet in the first 70 pages, I found at least 7 errors. (And bear in mind, each two pages presents one concept; therefore that averages out to one error per new idea.) Some were "screen typos," as in, the text would say "Type a question mark," but the little line to the screen image points to an asterisk. Other times, though, the information is flat-out wrong.

I'd hate to think what would have happened if I new nothing at all about XML, and just accepted these mistakes as gospel.

Suffice to say, I'm going to try to get my money back for this book.

This is one of the best books on XML. I bought the book 5 months ago with zero knowledge on XML, now, I'm an XML wizzard, got a raise of 7,000 over the last 3 months for my expertise with XML. This is a all-in-one XML book. It tells you step by step about XML, and it's all XML beginners need. A second best book on XML would be XML Bible, which is 1,300 pages. Would recommend reading the visual book first, then proceed to XML Bible to do some fancy stuff.

I found this book useful in getting started with XML, as it was the easiest to understand. It only covers XML and DTDs, not XSL, CSS, Xlink etc. Everything is spoon fed, and it assumes no programming knowledge. Still if you master the contents, you will have a reasonable basic knowledge of XML.

To most of the world, EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange. In this book, however, it stands for Electronic Document Interchange. The author's explanation of ED and its pros and cons are ridiculously simplistic and incomplete. I didn't expect this book to go into much detail about EDI, but I expected the information it did give to be accurate. This error makes me question the validity of the rest of the book. I'll find another resource, thanks.

This is an easy to read and understand guide to desigining and writing XML documents. It doesn't cover the programming half of the problem at all, not even mentioning popular XML parsers for various programming languages. So it's not complete for learning how to build systems that use XML. As befits a "Complete Idiot's Guide", it has a lot of redundancy. Maybe that's so you can understand what's going on no matter where you start in the book. There are some proofreading problems (wrong fonts, missing letters and punctuation, wrong words in examples) which suggest it was rushed out the door.

Everything in this book could be reduced to 20 pages including examples. Every idea is repeated over and over. Someone gave this book a glowing review, and said they finished in four days. A book you can finish in four days is cotton candy. Although the author makes several claims to show "XML in the real world", there is not one actual example of how you could use an XML file (how would you display this file on the net, or import it into Word, or whatever). The only thing the book covers is the structure of an XML file, and that not very well. And while the book trumpets the XML Pro editor, it's just a trial version of a product that the author wants to sell you. You pay $25 to read an ad for a product that costs $150. How is this even legal? And despite the reviews, this editor has limited value. It can help show the structure of an existing file, and can be useful for creating the structure of a new file. But if you create a file with say 20 elements per item, and 50 instances of the item, you would spend the entire day creating a file that would take 20 minutes with a normal data entry system. If you really want to learn about XML, get a real book.

I have never read a book so littered with mistakes. To a neophyte this book must be so confusing as to be totally useless. Can you believe the author gives three different renderings of the acronym SGML within a few pages of each other. Many absolutely critical points are muffed by the most banal and obvious proof reading errors. The final straw is the tear out reference card which can't even get the rules for XML names correct. Really, it's just too, too bad.

Bought this book a couple hours ago. I'm up to page 53 and so far all I've learned is that the author can talk and talk and talk and not say anything useful. This book is extremely painful and I'm not sure there will be any reward at the end. Unfortunately the O'Reilly book on the subject is out of print and this is about all there is ... nothing would almost be better.

I bought this book almost two years ago. Everytime I need to do something in XSL-FO I reach for this book. And almost everytime, I am frustrated and disappointed.

When originally learning XSL-FO, I bought this book because there were not too many options on the market and still aren't many. I felt like it made the learning process way more difficult than was necessary. I read two or three technical books per month and can usually absorb them pretty quick. This book does such a poor job of explaining concepts I struggled for a long time. I am really good with HTML, XML, XPATH and XSLT. I also have a pretty good grasp of print layout concepts and terminology. So I believe my struggle was by no means a technical or conceptual struggle. It was simply a problem of deciphering the author's language and presentation style.

As a reference, this book is even worse! It is just a bulleted list of tags and properties. Most are not defined. Two sentences and simple example of each would have made it useful, but that does not exist.

The one thing that could have saved this book would have been the index. But unfortunately, it's pretty bad also. You can't look up things by concept. You have to know what tag or property you are looking for. That's not of much use. For example, you will not find concepts such as bold, italic, underline or capitalization in the index. So if you don't know what tag or property controls those things you're out of luck. And since the author did such a bad job of teaching you're totally SOL.

I have learned XSL-FO through my own trial and error. I've done a lot of XSL-FO work and feel I have a decent understanding of the subject. Looking back on this book one last time, I can say this is one of the worst technical books I've ever bought.

Minimal examples, very little "big picture" orientation, long reference-style lists with minimal explanation of terms if any, and gives short shrift to how XSL:FO works with XSLT. The omission of fo: prefixes in examples is a an auctorial preference I find particularly annoying. Unfortunately it appears to be difficult to locate alternative books.

I'm surprised so many people have given this book a good review. I went with this book after the O'Reilly book was back ordered. What a mistake. The book might cover every formatting object in the W3C XSL-FO recommendation, but it's more like reading just that, the recommendation (which can be found online).

It's a bulleting of objects with minimal examples and sometimes difficult to understand explanations. I'm giving it two stars only because it serves as a useful quick formatting object reference to me at this point.

Avoid this book if you're new to XSL-FO. Otherwise, if you're looking for a reference guide, this might fit what you need.

There are some exposition paragraphs at the beginning of each topic. Otherwise the book is just page after page of bulleted lists. It's confusing, hard to read, and not worth your time. Read the O'Reilly book on XSL-FO instead.

This book is well written. It would be helpful if there were questions and the end of the chapter.

his book is primarily geared towards reader familiar withthe J2EE architecture. Code samples are few and far between, and the illustrations are primarily UML. That's cool. For a book from Sun J2EE team, I would like to see a little more code examples (thus the four stars instead of five.)

The book starts with XML basics, then spends the largest portion of the book on SOAP and JAX-RPC, then finishes off with an excellent chapter on security issues. There is some mention of mobile, but detailed enough.

I do suggest this book as a good reading for budding Java architects who want to learn more about this topic.

As the title of my review says this book is intended for all the people who want to architect and develop web services in a proper way. The technology around Web Services is very splitted. I mean from a lot of separate web associations. When you want to master web services technology you have to know in detail XML, XML Schema, SOAP, UDDI and its support in J2EE.
This book gives architectual overview how these technologies depend on each other, I mean the relationships.
The book is not intended for getting detail information about source code implementation. Anyway, it is from the SUN Blueprint program team. So everybody developing and architecturing web services with J2EE technology should read this book. It is a very dry book. Very talkative. I am glad I have already read it.

This book provides a very good, well ordered, high-level overview of architectural decisions in a Web Services application. If you have knowledge of J2EE technologies, and want an intro to the Web Services paradigm, this is a good book.

This is not a programmer's reference nor an introduction to J2EE technology.

The book is disciplined in maintaining a high-level overview; most code snippets are purposely contracted to show only the relevant features being discussed. This keeps the code snippets focused, but means that if you are looking for a sample SOAP document that does X, you'll need to look elsewhere.

I liked the organization of the book. Rather than organizing the book around an annotated sample application, the authors
take a more didactic approach; Chapter 1 gives an intro to Web Services, Chapter 2 reviews the alphabet soup of J2EE development and shows how various components either use the technologies or are connected by them.

The next five chapters each take one component of the Web Services domain and review in detail the architectural
decisions to be made in designing that component. In the chapter on Service Endpoint Design, for example, the authors review
two approaches to designing a service interface definition; should you first design a Web Services Definition Language or
should you first design the Java Interfaces? The Chapter on XML reviews the pros and cons of various XML parsers and the use of XML transformations for services which must interact with numerous systems. There are similar chapters reviewing Client design, Integration with the J2EE platform, and Security.

In the last chapter, the authors review their reference application and walk through their decisions.

Throughout, the authors give good advice on the judicious use of various technologies, use of Design Patterns, and designs that will give good, reusable code. The authors several times discuss patterns that will make the application simpler to understand and build upon.

All in all, this is a well written treatment that I highly recommend.

This book is primarily geared towards reader at the architectural end of the spectrum. Code samples are few and far between, and the illustrations are primarily UML. That's not a bad thing, it's just a matter of what you are looking for. Though even for an architecture work I would like to see a little more code (thus the four stars instead of five.)

The book starts with XML basics, then spends the largest portion of the book on SOAP and JAX-RPC, then finishes off with an excellent chapter on security issues. There is some mention of mobile, but nothing in depth.

I recommend this book to Java architects who want to learn more about this topic. Front line engineers will probably want to concentrate on API centric books on Java Web Services, most likely from O'Reilly.

Sorry guy's, one of the poorest books ever read.
Just good for using it as Monitor base.

Atention: 0.99 is too much money for it !!!!!

I often tried to understand what XML is through several published tutorials on the web. With my ASP knowledge I thought this topic would be easy to explain but I could not make sense of what they tried to tell me in these tutorials until I bought this book. It was then clear that XML is not as easy to explain in a couple of pages as HTML is. This book does a thorough job in teaching you step by step what XML is about and how you can put it to use in the real world.

...longer description: all explanations are very confused and confusing; nothing is clear. Buy another book (there are plenty of other books related to XML that are 2000% better for the same or lower price)

I was looking for an introductory book on XML and decided to pick up a copy of Mastering XML after reading the introduction and perusing the table of contents. The book covers a great deal of topics, but almost all of it is poorly explained and most of the examples are not very illustrative of the related material. The author tends to describe things in a round about way and has a habit of throwing in material that isn't covered until later in his explanations. I tried reading ahead in some cases, but those sections weren't covered any more clearly so it turned into a vicious cycle. I finally had to stop reading after 400 pages. I have a background in web development with HTML, JavaScript, Java servlets, and JSP, but I would not recommend this book as a first on XML. It might serve as a reference though.

I have the first edition of this book and it's very good. When I saw the "Premium Edition", I just knew it had to be better. Boy, was I wrong. I see from the cover that they changed authors, so perhaps that's what went wrong, but the information in this edition contradicts information in the first edition and in many cases, even contradicts the specs on the W3C web site. I've put mine up for sale as used and I'm sticking with the first book.

The book does a good job with explaining topics such as using XML as a database and using DOM to interface with XML. It is also a good book if you work in the Microsoft web technologies (ASP, VBScript), since many of the examples use ASP and VBScript to interface with the XML document.

However, I had to give it only three stars because it is not really a book for people new to programming, as this book advertises. A reader does need some kind of programming basics to understand some of the topics. Also, I think that the book glosses over the basics of XML. Even though the more intermediate topics like using XML as a database are explained well, a reader that is brand-new to XML could easily get lost because not enough emphasis was placed on the basics.

If you do work in the Microsoft technologies, and you want to learn and work with XML, then buy this book AFTER reviewing the free XML tutorial on [website]

just a warning- don`t be convinced by the "free code online" offer- they don`t give you a website, and if you do track it down from the publisher, you`ll discover its painful to use- that combined with the mistypes in the text and its a basket case.

other then that, the book is clear enough, but how can you learn a language without practice?

This book went to the presses to soon. Every example is full of errors. Every example is lacking and fails to show what it is intended to show. To add to my frustrations, online resources are not updated either. There are far too few illustrations. Far too few cross references. I would recommend "The XML Companion" by Neil Bradley, Addison Wesley. Just flick through the books side by side for 10 seconds and you get what I mean.

After reaching module 3 I became quite disappointed. The example in Module 2-1 is missing from the website and there are many coding and errors in the examples through out the book making it hard for a new comer to really learn what is right or wrong. Unfortunately there aren't many books out there for beginners. For a true new comer to XML and coding itself this book can be confusing. Would recommend at risk.

I am currently using this book in a class on XML. It has been used sparingly, thank God, by our instructor. The main book we rely on for good advise and examples of XML is written by Elizabeth Castro. If you don't want to waste your money on a book which is not very clear, concise, or written in a well defined and orderly manner, don't purchase this book. I have worked in the field of computer programming and written in 9 different computer languages, as well as, learning others. Take it from me, there are better books on this subject.

last week I bought the book , and till now it looks SO gerat

The book is too wordy, I think the reader donot want to read a story book, also it is better to put notes under screen shots and pictures.

I hope Friendsofed can notice the readers feedback. More content, few joke.

As Flash might finally emerge from experimental eye-catching gimmick to become the next generation front end for high commercial, dynamic web applications, this book really sets the wrong tone (explaining more about Tarot than XML does not match the book's title, right?).

Although writing the first four chapters must have been fun for the authors - for us, the readers, its just painful. Long and rather vague, XML is described from many angles without getting on a level where you really would know where to start in a practical sense. So when you really have to know about XML, or just need some reference, this book is most probably not for you.

Chapter 5, trying to compensate for the lengthy introduction, finally presents the XML object in warp speed. (If you are new to the subject, statements like "it would be so much easier if objects could be made directly from objects instead of having to remember its class" are more confusing than helpful, reflect bad style and do not really sell the idea behind object oriented programming).

Chapters 6 to 10 are not that bad when showing how XML shuffles the tarot cards. Still it might be too cloudy for beginners as the authors just lack focus.

The Rest of the book (XML Sockets, Perl Scripting, mySQL, PHP) gives you some ideas for the next books to buy, but definitively offer nothing you can start to do real business with.

In a nutshell: When having read this book you will know what XML is on a high level and how you deal with it once it sits within your flash movie. But this is not what XML was primarily made for.
When having read this book you still will not have much of a clue from where you will get interesting, business relevant XML data and how to make your flash application talk to the professional world of high end, high paid real world applications. Neither is there much help about dealing with end to end responsibilities. (test, debug, tune end to end transactions from Flash front-end, via web- and application servers down to databases and vice versa).

For my taste this book still remains with the classic, design oriented flash programmer rather than to finally extend Flash's scope into the realm of serious application development. The book's focus is ways too much on how XML is used internally within flash, rather than to make XML do what it was designed for: standardized communication across new and existing systems and new (web) services. Otherwise you might really ask yourself, what all the fuzz about XML really is.

As I have already said: do not polish your Porsch in your garage, take it out , learn to drive and experience the real world!

This book is a waste of money. I would suggest you check out XML in Flash by Craig Swann and Gregg Caines instead.

The introduction, which admittedly is quite good, lasts over half the book. After the lengthy introduction, the authors spend little or no time explaining the actual meat of dealing with XML in Flash. Most of the latter chapters will state that a certain task can be done with XML in Flash, but provide no insight on how to accomplish this task. Maybe I'm just weird, but I already knew that XML was useful for Flash applications, and the reason I bought the book was to learn how to do it, not to be told that it is possible!

For instance, the "XML Download/Upload" chapter is particularly frustrating. The early pages of the chapter tell the reader that Tomcat can be used to link Flash to a server via XML. However, after this statement, the authors offer absolutely no information as to how one might use Tomcat to serve XML to Flash, what servlets are available to accomplish this task, or how one goes about connecting to a Tomcat servlet from Flash. In my opinion, this is like telling a novice driver that "a car can take you places," and then turning them loose on the highway.

If you want to learn how to use XML applications with Flash, don't waste your money with this book, purchase the book XML In Flash instead -- it's more in-depth, more concise, and best of all, cheaper.

am I supposed to do with a fony Tarot application. I toatlly agree with the previous reviews. TO much hassel. I am getting into some flash application development, for which I got the taste after working my way through Friends of Ed's Dynamic Content Studion, which, by the way, is an EXCELLENT book....

but this....c'mon

The SOAP standard is a new standard based on XML intended to provide a mechanism for distributing objects over the Internet. It is good to keep in mind when reading this book that the main use of many standards will differ from the originally intended use; the most visible application of SOAP today is Microsoft's Biztalk initiative, which is not based on a distributed objects paradigm but on a messaging paradigm.

This book clearly explains SOAP in the distributed object context. The SOAP concepts and design philosophy are very well explained in the first four chapters; these chapters also give a good comparison of SOAP with the other well known distributed technologies as DCOM and CORBA. The XML functionality is very well explained in the next three chapters with many clear examples. Those seven first chapters + the appendices form the important part of the book, with clear information what SOAP is about and how it works.

The next three chapters are mainly for the interested. Some of the information was already dated at the publishing date. Chapter 8 gives a short description of the use of SOAP in BizTalk; the description of SOAP Toolkit is based on a prerelease version of this Toolkit. Chapter 9 mentions current issues SOAP1.1 does not address yet, and gives some impression about the possible direction of next SOAP standard.

Chapter 10 is for the diehard C++ programmers, who want to try out everything. This chapter is almost 200 pages long and gives an example / programming exercise about how to implement a COM language binding. I did not go through this chapter, it is not useful for understanding SOAP; I expect within the near future we will see standard API's for SOAP, so programmers in C++ and other languages do not have to deal with SOAP at such a low level. This books tells everything a consultant or developer needs to know about SOAP. However half of the book (chapters 8 and 10) is not very useful for most, but might be interesting for some. Within a year chapters 8-10 will be completely outdated.

This book is basically Microsoft propaganda for their Biztalk.

If you do MS Biztalk and use exclusively MS tools, this is your book.

The soap spec in the appendix was the only useful part of the book.

This book is a difficult read. It's difficult because it's poorly written, it's difficult because it doesn't really say much, and it's especially difficult because after about an hour of trying to find something of value you will start getting very angry that you were ripped off. Supposedly this book should give you the information you need to "understand" SOAP. In fact, SOAP is not very complicated; it's XML messages flying back and forth via HTTP. It's like CORBA or RMI only text-based. But instead of getting this message across and exciting the reader about what can be done with the technology, the authors have chosen to write in the most boring, matter-of-factual language they could possibly utter. Worse, they bloat the pages with reams upon reams of C++ code. Not Java or C# or Visual Basic that most developers that would be interested in SOAP use, but C++. Each C++ segment is explained in painful detail by near-pseudocode text, no doubt to fill as many pages as possible but with the dreadful side-effect of boring the reader to tears. The chapters that try to "introduce" XML are particularly bad, dry and unintelligible. In fact, it almost seems as if the authors didn't understand XML themselves, which seems hard to believe since Stiver claims to have spent two years with it. Perhaps it's just really bad writing style, or really bad attention to detail, or just a great deal of pressure from the publisher to get something, anything, out and onto the shelves. The result is a worthless white book that should no be any part of a web developer's library.

This book contains actually too books: 1) A deep introduction to SOAP. 2) A description for a SOAP to DCOM to SOAP converting framework. ad 1) This book is a true must have for its description to SOAP. It shows the details in a clear and trustworthy stile. Also one gets a good impression on the impact of this technology without any hype. I am strongly looking forward to a new updated edition.

ad 2) This is hard stuff. You have to be reasonably well acquainted with DCOM at the ATL level. Some knowledge on Assembler is also more than helpful. The framework is ok, though incomplete. Yes it is a bargain at the price of the book and it is interesting to read through.

Should this be two separate books? I think so yes. Though than I would never have read the second book.

Excellent presentation of fundamental SOAP technology in chapters 1-7 (193 pages). Explains how the SOAP protocol and request/response model can be used in web applications. Compares SOAP with CORBA and DCOM. Illustrates the contents of SOAP request and response messages. Presents an ISAPI extension for monitoring SOAP traffic (debugging & development). Defines XML content of SOAP messages and shows how to package data types using XML types including base64 for data structures. Introduces approaches for managing state-information in a SOAP based application. Chapter 8 explains how Microsoft's BizTalk Server uses SOAP technology. Briefly discusses the philosophy of Microsoft's SOAP toolkit. Chapter 10 presents code for creating a transparent framework for COM objects which are unaware of SOAP to be called through the SOAP protocol. Chapter 10 covers at least 1/3 of the book, is difficult to understand, consists primarily of code, and occasionally drops into assembly language for unexplained reasons.