My opinions of this book varied wildly as I ploughed my way through its 1000+ pages. It started well with a very readable coverage of Basic XML document structure. The explanations were clear and the book handles examples well, by building up complex examples step by step, using bolding to show the changes between consecutive
examples.

The chapter on DOM (number 3) is where my main criticisms started. There is a reasonable description of the technology buried under a pile of examples. Each point tends to be illustrated in Java, VB, C++ (oops, Microsoft Visual C++), Perl and PHP. I felt that these examples might be useful, but I would have liked to see most of them relegated to a website. To take their place I would have liked to see some of the API definitions.

These issues annoyed me (and annoyed me throughout the book). However, I persevered, skipped most of the examples and skimmed the rest of them. This (for me) improved the book and turned it into an interesting (if over-heavy) summary of XML and a vast array of associated technologies.