The cover contains the terms XML and JAVA in a huge font. This misleads the buyer, because this book is not a tutorial on how to use XML in Java applications. The book assumes that you know XML and Java. That is a pity, because XML is sufficiently new, that some pages about its structure and an explanation of, e.g. Document Type Definition (DTD) might have been in place. This would have been a better choice instead of the 222 pages of appendixes. The appendixes contain the (freely available on the Internet) XML 1.0 recommendation, the Document Object Model standard, the SAX Interfaces and the Java DOM language binding. I considered those pages a waste of paper. The whole book has been typeset in a very large font, which gives the book a cheap look.
Enterprise Application Integration is about how to integrate various applications. The author proposes that using a declarative environment makes this task easier. He gives some very simple examples, in which I wondered whether using XML and Java was the best solution. The whole book is very much technology driven, that is, given XML and Java, how can you achieve a certain task. This seems the wrong way round. Why not design the desired system's architecture first and only then incorporate the possibilities of the technologies. An interesting example is how to model a database schema into XML, but for only a fewpeople the book will be worth the£37. The best ideas could have been better filtered out in a compact article.
