I took this book as it was a recommended book for one my courses.. i thought it would be same as other text books, where you actually LEARN THRU THE BOOK..

But this book is STRICTLY for a reference purpose.. I had to take another book to learn the basics of XML.. also, the net tutorials helped a lot..

Though, as a reference book, I'll give full points to it.. once you have the basic knowledge about XML, you can really use this book to its optimum level, and it really helps you to refer ALL the types in XML..

So if you are starting to learn XML, I would advise to take a simpler book, like "XML Applications" and go through the net too.. but once you are done with the basics, buy this book the very next day, and check out what all wonders you can do through XML!!!...

I chose this book after reading the glowing reviews here at Amazon, hoping to use it as an introductory tutorial to XML. I was disappointed!

The writing style chosen by the author is terse, as if writing space is at a premium - and this for a book which is 600+ pages long. The examples are badly chosen in my opinion, and the explanation of basic concepts is presented in the style of a reference manual. Take for example the explanation of the NOTATION element attribute: "A notation type attribute contains the name of a notation declared in the document's DTD... In theory, it could be used to associate types with particular elements, as well as limiting the types associated with the elements".

At this stage, I gave up on this book and went instead to Hunter's "Beginning XML". Still, all wasn't lost: I read a colleague's copy, so at least I wasn't out of pocket.

The organization of the book is great. Very useful and well written. It provides quick-reference syntax rules and usage examples for the core XML technologies, including XML, DTDs, Xpath, XSLT, SAX, and DOM. Develop an understanding of well-formed XML, DTDs, namespaces, Unicode, and W3C XML Schema.

This new edition is the comprehensive XML reference. Serious users of XML will find coverage on just about everything they need, from fundamental syntax rules, to details of DTD and XML Schema creation, to XSLT transformations, to APIs used for processing XML documents.

The initial chapter on SAX along with the reference chapter would give me a solid foundational base from which to work. If you need explanation of how a technology works, or just need to quickly find the precise syntax for a particular piece, XML in a Nutshell puts the information at your fingertips. I would recommend this book to someone interested in its topic. This book has earned a valued place on my reference shelf.

In my opinion, XML In A Nutshell is the definitive reference for XML syntax and use. I've had this book on my desk since the first edition. Now at edition 3, this book just keeps getting better and better. It covers virtually every XML standard, provides lots of examples, and has a character set reference that I couldn't live without. Highly recommended for all XML questions.

Like many of the "Nutshell" books, this book starts off with a lot of informational chapters, designed to give a high level view of many XML-related technologies. These chapters, while a bit vague in parts, are still very good and will answer most general questions. However, when you have a deeper question, the reference chapters in the second half of the book really shine. The reference material is well organized, making information easy to find and digest.

Personally, my favorite chapters are the XPath Reference and the XSLT Reference sections.

Anyone who works with XML on a daily basis should have this book at their desk. This is the one book to have on XML.

They might as well take out the first half of the book at trying to teach beginners XML. The reason being that the writing style is confusing, full of long run-on sentences, with few to no examples for demonstration. As a reference book, this is probably a flawless companion. And it does say that it's intended for experienced developers. The tutorial chapters serve well as reviews and tips if the person already knows some XML. Also, make sure you check the book's web site, it has a long errata list, so get ready to correct those errors. If you're a beginner to XML, this isn't the book to start out with. I recommend "Beginning XML - 3rd Edition" by Wrox Press as your first XML book.

This is a combination field guide and terse standards reference for XML. It covers an amazing variety of XML standards. From the fundamentals of XML, through the document standards, and into transformation technologies like XSLT. Standards include; XML, XPath, XLink, XSLT, XSL-FO, XML Schema, DTDs, among others. The book also cover some standards that use XML, like SAX and DOM.

The book is fairly high level. It assumes that you know the basics and need a complete reference for the technologies. This is that case with all of the Nutshell books, but given the amount of technologies this books cover, the coverage is fairly terse.

The organization of the book is great. There are only a few illustrations and they are used effectively. A solid reference for anyone who works with XML technologies on a daily basis. Highly recommended.

This books has all what you need to know about XML, simple nice and all examples are in JAVA.

I'm using this book as a text book for my students in Advance web development course

There's no question that HTML is neat. It tells a web browser how to display text in a way that the writer desired. But, and it's a very big BUT, if you want to go to a web site and get the page, and then extract some data from that page into your own program, you have a problem. The answer is XML.

This page you are reading now has the title of the book on it. The title is in bigger, bolder type. How would you go about extracting the title? It clearly has some kind of HTML commands around it. But they could be bold, strong, em, h1, h2, etc. You'd have to know exactly what the program was putting out and then expect that it never would change.

If it were in XML it would say something like [title]title goes here[/title] (in reality thesquare brackets are angle brackets, just like HTML). You would know exactly what to seach for as the delimiters of the title itself. This is, of course a simplified example, but you get the idea.

This book, typical of an O'Reilly book is professionally written by and for professionals. If it's your task to begin outputting data in XML, this is the essential reference book you'll want on your desk.

If you're looking for a single volume on XML to give you many of the answers you need, I would suggest checking out XML In A Nutshell by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means (O'Reilly).

Chapter list: Introducing XML; XML Fundamentals; Document Type Definitions (DTDs); Namespaces; Internationalization; XML as a Document Format; XML on the Web; XSL Transformation (XSLT); XPath; XLinks; XPointers; XInclude; Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO); Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL); XML as a Data Format; XML Schemas; Programming Models; Document Object Model (DOM); Simple API for XML (SAX); XML Reference; Schemas Reference; XPath Reference; XSLT Reference; DOM Reference; SAX Reference; Character Sets; Index

As you can see, there's a lot of ground covered here. Since XML is such a diverse set of standards and technologies, different readers will probably get differing amounts of value from this book. For instance, if I was delving into CSS for a website project, this book wouldn't give me much of what I need. The coverage on CSS is very light and introductory. Conversely, if I was starting to use SAX, the initial chapter on SAX along with the reference chapter would give me a solid foundational base from which to work. It seems that most of the quality material is found in the core XML standards. And as with most Nutshell books, they are not meant to be tutorials for the beginner. They provide a no-fluff reference for the professional to refer back to for quick answers. This book coupled with a stand-alone book on a specific XML standard would be a great combination.

Is it perfect? No. But it will give you a lot of information in a single location that will prevent you from having to comb through multiple other volumes.

How much XML do you need to know? Me, I read and write XML daily in my programs. But without having to support legacy data, I've found that I can use a very minimal subject to good effect. No mixed content, no attributes in tags, etc. So I can use SAX very easily. And I only need a small subset of this book.

But chances are that you may not be in such an easy situation. You might have to transform XML data using XSLT. While conceptually simple, the details are complex. So the book's section on XSLT can be vital. Another usage context is when you have to do some kind of search within XML data. The purview of XPath, XPointer and XLink. More good stuff to lookup here for explanations.

Harold writes fluently about XML. He has several other well received books on XML. So technically, you can rely on this book to get the details right. But few of you should need to know all of this book. XML has grown vastly, to serve increasingly different and specialised needs. The book tries to address the totality of these needs. So don't be intimidated if you see chapters that you are totally unaware of. I'm in the same boat as you, and so are many others.