Rating: 
Summary: Hard to read.
Review: The book is very hard to read, because of author style and subject matter. It starts to get more interesting after the first chapter. Plenty of examples if you are into java.
Rating: 
Summary: I wanted to like it...
Review: The problem with this book is that it is too abstract, not practical. In the 'real world' of software development, we need examples that apply. If you want to talk philosophy and examine odd insights, buy this book. If you want to really build XML solutions, don't.
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Summary: Non-Essential XML
Review: The title of this book is very misleading. If someone wants to read what essential XML is - the essence of XML -, all they have to do is read the W3C recomendations a couple of times. These are freely available on the web. But a book entitled "Essential XML", if it is to be true its title, should elaborate on the W3C reccomendations only to the extent that these elaborations will be useful and meaningful to everbody. And this book is far from that. This book is best suited for academics, writers, a small subset of application developers and/or people who have lots of time on their hands and are at loss as to what to read next. If the author was being honest, he would have called this book "The XML Infoset" and left it that. Those who are interested in this sub-topic would have then bought the book. But then, the author would not have been repayed as handsomely as he is presumably being payed now. I fear that Mr. Box is cashing in on the "Guru" status he as (rightly) acquired with his COM/DCOM/MTS books and articles. His first COM book, "Essential COM" was more aptly titled than this one, in that it did describe the bare bones of COM. However, it shared some of the shortfallings as this book in that it made it's subject-matter unnecessarily abstract and academic. For academic, read "divorced from practical application". For all practical purposes, you always need to read another book after reading one of Mr Box's "essential" books. I think the main reason "Essential COM" was such a runaway success is NOT that it was the best COM book, by any stretch of the imagination, but that it was the FIRST printed book which took COM seriously. Perhaps the author is trying to repeat this success with XML? If you ask me, he's taking XML way too seriously. By buying this book you're only going to encourage Mr Box to write more books like this one; now wouldn't that be a waste. My advise: get a book thats more geared to the platform(s) you're developing for, and if you're interested in arcana then look up the W3C infoset stuff on the web. But hey, if you're a diehard Box fan, I guess you're gonna get this book anyway.
Rating:
Summary: "When Don Box Attacks" part 3
Review: This book (after Essential COM and Effective COM) is another tour de force of the author's arrogant, high blood-pressure writing style. Less attitude and more insight beyond what's in the specs would make this book worthwhile. All the material this book covers is excellently covered by freely available white papers/tutorials at w3.org and msdn.microsoft.com/xml.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Discussion of XML, but not for Everybody
Review: This book is a consise resource for XML/XML-derived technologies. "Essential XML", is an academic book that discusses XML at its root level (not strings with angle brackets.) Rather it delves into the XML Infoset. For users of XML who aren't writing parsers, this is the appropriate angle with which to regard XML. For programmers like myself who write business applications, the Entity model spelled out by the Infoset abstracts the user of XML from the data encoding methodology. This is especially important in the new world of Microsoft .Net which features multiple encoding styles. Others I have discussed this book with usually complain about two items. 1.No "real-world" examples. There aren't any samples in Visual Basic that show how to create an XML Document from a database query and display it to the user. This model is very similar to that of "Essential COM." This is not a book that will enable you to lift code (there are lots of websites for that). It targets the user who wants a better notion of what XML is and how it should be seen. 2.Not enough uses of the Microsoft XML Parser. I work entirely in Microsoft tools and I know Don Box has been revered as the "Messiah of COM", but where others think that the lack of use of the Microsoft DOM is bad, I think it is great. It really underscores the point that XML is all about interop. And the use of Java in samples that call DOM and SAX implementations is easy to read from all languages. DOM implementations are allowed some variance in how they do certain things. Rather than waste time discussing a particular implementation, the authors chose to keep it vendor neutral. This book is definitely not for every developer. I have two shelves of computer books. The first one contains how-to books, the second contains academic books. This book resides on my academic shelf in between Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" and a Numerical Analysis textbook from college. With XML being such a hyped technology this book does a great job of not promising to solve world hunger or even make applications easier to write and maintain. It covers XML completely and to the point.
Rating:
Summary: Concepts, concepts
Review: This book is a little confusing if you are starting with XML. But if you keep working on it, you will find it really rewarding. It focuses on giving you a conceptual review of the technologies related to XML and XML itself, instead of providing a bunch of "if you have this problem, do this" kind of receipts. It is outdated by now in terms of the sintax, specially with the XML schema spec getting the recommendation status. Nevertheless the concepts behind didn't change fundamentally. If you have read the Primer from the W3C but didn't get enough from it, but don't want to go to the spec (who reads that?) then this book may be of great help.
Rating:
Summary: Another great book from Don Box
Review: This book is a must read for anyone who wants to go beyond the angle bracket rules in XML. As the preface states, this book presents XML from data-centric point of view. It is a dense read! It tremendously helped me in learning XPath, XML Schema, and XSLT. Another plus point is that this book is vendor neutral. It is focused on the technology rather than a particular vendor's implementation of XML parsers and tools.
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Summary: Thorough reference for all XML technologies
Review: This book provides thorough coverage of all current XML technologies in a concise, precisely worded prose. I especially appreciated the side-by-side treatment of the DOM and SAX, the in-depth coverage of XSLT, and the most digestible treatment of XML Schemas to date (based on the latest working draft of the standard). Distributed application developers will appreciate the last chapter covering the Simple Object Access Protocol - an XML-based RPC standard being adopted by many vendors today.
Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners, other than that excellent
Review: This book touches deep XML guts, which are usually rightfully ignored by practical XML developers. But if you are practical XML developer, you don't need books - it's too simple for that. And if as a practical XML developer you practically hit some cumbersome sophisticated academic XML question, like "How many demons can be placed in a single XML element without child nodes?" (and this really happens sometime), you have two options. Number one is to dig into W3 stuff with a chance to be buried there forever. Number two is to try a book like this. This way I found this book very useful. It is also excellent to keep you on track with current XML development. Schemas? Yeah, right here. SAX? Why not. SOAP? Is this Microsoft proprietary stuff? No! It's submitted to W3 by IBM, Lotus, SAP and few othercompanies, including MS. This book gives up to date latest state of XML which you may have a problem of tracking otherwise, if you don't devote to XML all your work time.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Book overall but not the best
Review: This is a pretty good book in terms of explaining XML. However, there are a couple of things you should note BEFORE buying the book. 1. ALL examples are in JAVA. So if you are a JAVA programmer looking for an XML book you could consider this one. 2. The dialog is overly complex. the explainations of many basic XML concepts are overly complex and could be said in a easier to understand way. Just be prepared to have to re-read things a couple of time and say to yourself "I cuold say that in such an easier way". Overall..The book covers XML and does give you the essentials you need to grasp the technology
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