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.

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.

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.