Admittedly, I'm only up to the second chapter in this book, but it's clear that Castro needed a better editor. She relies on a frustrating "Type this, then we'll come back to it later" approach (example: naming your DTD, then finding out four pages later HOW to apply that information). Disappointing as her XHTML + CSS and Flash MX books were much tighter in execution.

This book does cram a whole lot of information into a tiny space. I will say that, if you are interested in getting started with XML, the book tries to include all the "pieces" you need - like not just XML code, but DTDs and XSLT, etc.

However, the section on XSLT is seriously lacking. I worked on trying to make a VERY BASIC stylesheet yesterday and have yet to get one working. (I'm not new to programming either.) The book gives a lot of "do this, do that" examples, but without explaining the concepts of XSLT more completely and logically, it doesn't really equip you to go out and write stylesheets yourself. I'm disappointed.

I have many of this series of books. It is always my first choice when I need to learn about something new.

Look I just purchased the book "Web Page Collection" by this author, it is "Visual Quick Project" Nothing works, the links given do not work, the instructions are NOT correct and the book is a waste. No address was given to write directly to the author so this my best way to say I would not buy another book by the author.

The author spends almost the entire book typing out the syntax of the various statements and seems to lack in conveying an over all structure or framework in which to better understand XML. After the 1st few chapters the book becomes very repeative in it's approach.

I have written an industrial strenght XML processor (parser, navigator, constructor), but I wondered just how it would apply to the WWW and webpages in particular. This book not only showed me how XML might be used, it contains information on XSLT and CSS as well. There is virtually no techo guff (I write enough of that myself) and plenty of practical examples. Use this book if you want to use XML in a Web-context. It will be more helpful than just about anything else I've read.

Others have commented on their failings with this book. I'll add mine: layout and fonts. In theory, you'd expect a two-column layout with text on one side, and code on the other, to better visually present information than traditional textbooks. The reality, however, is snippet-heavy examples, because of insufficient space in the book to see the code. The abundance of different font sizes and colors used in code and the text less result in clarity than the Los Angeles freeway. When later using the book for reference, I had a more difficult time than I should have skimming the busy pages for information. I've since found another XML to review information from, which obviously means I don't recommend this book.

This is my third attempt at learning XML. And after reading this book I am still trying to answer this question: why do we need XML when we already have XHTML and CSS? Is XML just another whizz-bang technology for the egg heads? Others here have asked that same question.

Unfortunately, you will not receive any answers to this important question with Castro's book. She explains the details of XML very well but provides no real world examples of what XML is actually good for. This is like explaining the HTML tags in detail, but never really explaining what the purpose of HTML is. It would be better to start off by explaining that HTML is used to layout web pages for the world wide web and show us a few examples.

Also, the tiny, tiny font used to accompany the code snippet figures is hard to read without a magnifying glass (and it's in Italics too!). A bold face, font size +1 would have been much easier on the eyes. So be sure to have your reading glasses handy.

In the meantime, I will continue to search for a book, ANY book, which can explain to me just what XML is good for! It must be good for something, as I recognize the power of being able to define your own HTML or markup tags via XML. But this book, like some others I've read, fails to explain the "why" or "how" of it. I'll keep it as a nuts & bolts reference for later -- after I've learned why this technology was invented to begin with.

Castro's book can best be summed up with a her own understatement of words from p. 15. "Unfortunately, the reality of using XML is still not quite up to the vision."

This is a decent reference guide, but uncomfortably out of date. While the author keeps her site updated for latest changes, why buy a book when you need to read the most up to date info online anyway? The book is an excellent bargain, but a free online tutorial (on oreilly for example) is a much better deal. The best intro to XML book I've read is still Beginning XML (WROX--wait for the 3rd edition if you can, the 2nd edition is still more recent and more useful than the VQ guide).

XML, as is explained in the book, is not ready for web pages. However, web page developments are evolving toward XML. Elizabeth Castro explains what that future would look like. This book is for you if you are thinking ahead in your web page development; I found it to be very helpful in understanding how XML will fit into the future. Don't bother reading it if you don't know and don't care what style sheets are.

The first reference book I reach for.
Like most Peachpit books, this XML guide is low on fluff and high on useful, easy to understand info. It gives me principles and examples in very helpful ways. Each example is worth my time, because Castro thinks them out carefully and makes them useful on more than one level.
XML continues to change, so I consider the publisher's website as part of the book. Their online updates are better than most.

I had high hopes for this book, But I have come away disappointed. I used Castro's HTML book to learn that language, and I was favorably impressed. I found the examples in that book easy to walk through, and I felt they did a good job explaining basic concepts and procedures. I also liked the fact that Castro brought a designer's perspective to the subject.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same for this book. I have spent the better part of a day on its chapter on XSLT, and I don't feel like I have gotten a handle on the subject. I feel about the same way about XML schemas. I think XML may simply be a subject that requires a programmer's, rather than a designer's perspective.

The book could use a complete rewrite, particularly its walkthroughs, which I have had trouble following and making sense of. If you need to write style sheets, schemas, or anything else beyond the simplest XML, you are probably better served by another book.

I've read some of Elizabeth Castro's other books and been fairly satisfied. Her strength has generally been showing basic material and then showing how it would look. I realize that XML isn't quite HTML, but where there should have been examples there were often things like, I.E. and Mozilla don't support this yet, so I can't show you how it should look. Perhaps the book shouldn't have been written yet, and maybe a later edition would be better.

Money is OK.... :)
This is a book written by and for HTML coders. It doesn't teach the gist of XML or guide you to do anything that really needs XML. On the other hand, if you just want to understand some basics of XML (instead of DOING real things), I think it is better to find a review paper on XML instead, which will save you time and get the point easier. This author wrote a wonderful HTML book, but this XML one looks like a piggyback on the reputation earned there - may ruin it.

Great overall resource for learning and understanding XML. This is a great place to start if you're not sure how to use XML in your development endeavours. The fact that its the only book i've needed (about xml) is a tribute to how well it's served us in our office.

Great background of the subject, and a great overview of DTD's a majore part of XML's scope. This book will definitly get you up to speed on the world of XML.

This book is geared more towards the "For Dummies" crowd. It presents the basics and has an example for almost every concept it covers. It is also very cheap.

This is a good book if you are new to XML or need to learn a few basic concepts to keep up in the work environment, lingo mostly. If you want to create and support XML production level code then this book isn't for you.

I have the HTML Visual QuickStart guide, which was extremely helpful, so I bought this one hoping for more of the same. Unfortunately, this was no help whatsoever.

It NEVER explains why in the world I would need to learn XML. It looks like almost all of what it shows in the book can be done with straight HTML, java script, and/or css, so why should I learn another language on top of all that????? Anything more advanced is not covered in depth, or not covered at all. Very disappointing book, I've gone through the whole thing a few times and still can't find any reason why I would need to learn this.
And as for the "examples" shown in the book, they are pathetic. You never see the beginning or end result of what they are doing! And the code is never shown fully, just a few lines of what is being done at the time. At least once at the end would have been great, but no dice.

XML is supposed to be the new standard? Well after reading this either XML is almost completely worthless, or this book just didn't teach anything. I'm still trying to figure out which.

I've been interested in learning XML for some time now and checked out various websites and bought this book. But the sites and this book fail to give any reason why I should use XML... I've been working with VB, VBA, VBScript, C, C++, JAVA, JavaScript, and more for years and they all serve a clear purpose. I just cant figure out how XML makes my life easier - it just makes me type much more.

As for the book, I found the figures much easier to follow than the text that refers to them. The text is very repetitive and bland (type this, type that). Also, there are constant references to other pages that kept me hopping around the book until I was cross-eyed.

I recommend visiting IBM or Micro$oft and checking out their free online tutorials before reading this book, especially for newbies to XML like me.

If you plan on learning XML, this is the real deal. Every thing is covered in depth. Castro even mentions how to integrate this with flash to make slide shows, games, and other flash-lets (as I like to call them).

Get this book to organize your databases.
Get this to make your web page code more concise.
Get this book if you are interested at all in any web development fields.

This book takes all aspects of the XML language and integrates all that Castro knows into feasible, easy to swallow pieces made for the beginner. Highly rated.

XML and its companion technologies are complicated. This book
provides a very readable introduction. I recommend this book
for any XML beginner including technical strong individuals.

My initial impression of the Visual QuickStart series was very positive, but I don't think this way any more, and especially so after reading this book. The format works OK for a reference book, but it fails as a tutorial. There is no overall big-picture and conceptual understanding of XML. The author gives lots of excerpts from a single extended example that illustrate specific syntax issues, but working with these small pieces is very hard to follow. Smaller complete examples would have been much more helpful.

One very important topic - even for beginners - is completely missing. This is the DOM (short for Document Object Model) that lets the programmer use the different XML nodes in a programming language such as Visual Basic. We use XML at my workplace as a means of transmitting information from a SQL Database to code modules that can operate on the information, but there is nothing in this book that is helpful here.

There is also no explanation of why the different aspects of XML are significant in the real world. After reading this book, I got the impression that the main function of XML is to format data stored in XML files for end user presentation in HTML. But XML is much more important than this.

The book will be of some use - I will be referring to it for answers to specific questions. But if this was the only XML book I had read, I would not have any good grasp of the topic. For an excellent beginner's book on XML, read 'XML Step by Step' by Michael J. Young (now in a second edition). You can really learn something there.

I was designing a college course in XML and was sent at least a half a dozen books on XML by different publishers to review as a potential textbook. Even though I had extensive "tomes" available to me, I found myself returning to the Castro book when I needed to figure out how to do something. She has a knack of getting to the point without digressing into endless details. XML is such a vast subject that it can be impossible to get a handle on it without a book like this. Even though not written as a textbook, I've decided to use it for the course I'm writing.

After being forced to purchase the disaster Deitel book on XML for a class, I found that the best introduction was Castro's Visual Quickstart guide on the subject. For a fraction of the price of the Deitel text, the essentials of XML are clearly explained in Castro's book. I have found her texts on Perl and HTML very useful as well.

A good beginner book, but not as good as I had expected.

Why is it that no one has ever written a study book which does not include verbosity? That does clearly indicate where in the examples they are referring to? That has download examples that can be easily referenced? This book sets out to solve all that but fails - dissapointed.

Not a whole lot to say on this one. It is passable, but not very good as a full tutorial. I think O'Reilly's offering in this battle is a better one. There are also a couple Wrox press books that do a better job than this one.

The Quickstart guides have always been about concise introductions on the topics presented and this book is no exception. The problem is people will come away from this book thinking they know XML and in actuality know merely the facade on the building.

To put a face on that last statement: Imagine, if you will, telling your friend all about the new candy bar you found. It was nice looking, chocolate, had little sprinkles. You go into great detail on how it looked, smelled and packaged. Your friend now likes the sound of this and everything is going great right up to the point where he asks "How did it taste?" Problem was you were so interested in a quick tour of the candy bar you forgot to taste it. That is the problem with this book in a nutshell.

'Course the other problem is that this book has a SERIOUS political agenda (the saving of Animal species) on nearly every page and in almost if not all examples. This is not a big issue, but in a book which already is marginal in quality, being preached to about how we need to save animal X or Y or they will all DIE!! is a bit much. Bad form, in my opinion. If an author wants to make a political point then write a political book. I don't mind a bit of an agenda, we all have one, but being beaten with it page after page is what made the final choice for me in NOT using this book in my XML classes.

Thanks for your time, Jim

This is the third "visual quickstart" book I've purchased, and probably the last. After reading it I still didn't feel like I had a decent grasp of XML. I then went and purchased "XML in a Nutshell" by O'Reilly, which does a much better job of explaining XML, despite being more technical.

In general, the visual quickstart books try and teach you by example, without explaining the necessary background theory. They try to "dumb down" the material for the reader, which is a bad thing in my opinion for something like a computer or markup language. They are adequate for getting quickly up to speed with a topic for something like a high school assignment, if your interest in the technology is only for the short term. If you are going to use what you are reading for real world projects however, these books are not adequate, you will feel like you have wasted your money. I also did not feel that the author had a solid grasp of the material, in contrast to the authors of the O'Reilly book.

The O'Reilly books for example explain WHY things are the way they are, and in a far more clear manner too. Plus, they make much better reference books. Basically, there are a lot of junk books out there, and trying to find decent ones is hard.

In conclusion, get this book if you are very short on $$$ and need to cram some knowledge for the short term. Get a decent book if you need to learn XML for real projects, and want a good reference book too.

The amazing use of red text really highlights each step of the exposition. The coverage is very practical and vital, with valuable repitition to drive home the points. I was glad to have the coverage of XML Schemas, XPath, and XPointer. This is a very clearly written book, with practical application. I was at first surprised to see CSS in the table of contents, but after reading the book I realized why CSS was in there. Also, Ms. Castro does a good job on her web site of exposing errata (which is very small) and fostering a discussion forum.

It teaches the reader a good deal of XML. The visuals accompanied by clear and consise explanation will help you jump start your way into XML.

However, for those who want theory, I wouldn't suggest this book as this does not build you up on that. I dont' know what to recommend instead with regards to XML theory, but I sure hope you find one.

--EDITED--
- There are a lot of better books out there now and more up-to-date. So, even I recommend this book, try to look for other books instead.

I was very impressed with the author's 'HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide,' so I started 'XML for the World Wide Web' with great enthusiasm. The opening chapters were clear, concise, and easy to follow. Unfortunately, as the book continued, I found the examples more difficult to decipher. There are two web sites supporting the book, but I found neither site answered my questions to any degree of satisfaction. The examples used are poorly explained, much to my surprise. I would suggest tracking down tutorial sites on the web as a primary source of information instead of starting with this text.

Elizabeth Castro has done it again! The "conceptual" explanations (always the key to long term success in any computer technology) are magnificently lucid, at just the right level of detail. The practical examples demonstrate the implementations chosen by the standards bodies for the concepts. I don't see how this could have been done better! I am a working developer with 3 to 4 XML books in my library. This book is the most useful.

I'm pretty picky about computer books because I write computer books myself. I'm always really happy then when I read a computer book that's more than just regurgitated documentation and when the author does an extra fine job at discussing and explaining some technology. That's the case with Castro's book. She does a great job. It's easy to read. And a profitable use of the reader's time. This is a perfect introduction to XML.

Like Ms Castro's HTML Quick Start Guide, this book offers an excellent introduction to XML, concise and descriptive text on the left side of each page and code examples on the right. This makes it easy to understand and learn the concepts being discussed.

Castro describes the "nuts and bolts" of XML, discussing first how to write an XML document, and then creating a Document Type Definition (DTD), essential for any XML document. Subsequent chapters describe elements, attributes, values, entities, and namespaces in XML documents. As with the HTML Quick-Start guide, there are coded examples to guide you through each step and topic discussed.

While full browser support for XML still seems a ways off, its potential overshadows any questions anyone may have about it. It's still well worth knowing and Castro makes learning about XML quite easy.

This is an excellent book that introduces the user to XML. XML is a very difiicult subject to cover and I feel that Elizabeth covered it very well. Several topics are covered and it is enough to get you programming in basic XML after reading just a short portion.

I would recommend this book to anyone searching for an in depth guide on XML or something to keep on hand for a reference to reteach you XML or make sure you never forget. This book covers its subject matter and is very to the point. This book does not beat around the bush with unimportant subject matter. THIS BOOK WILL NOT WASTE YOUR VALUABLE TIME.

Thanks for reading.

Great for beginners with no XML background, but I prefer this one: XML: Your Visual Blueprint for Building Expert Web Pages (With CD-ROM) by Emily Vander Veer