Rating: 
Summary: Too much hype, too little delivery
Review: Too many people (myself included) jumped on the bandwagon as soon as they saw 'Don Box'. The book is more suited for a study in an academic environment as opposed to us in the real world who have delivery schedules and have to learn technology effectively.A full third of the book is just a regurgitation of other (out of date, even at print time) resources found on the web. This book is probably more eye candy on your bookshelf versus something developers can actually use to help them do their jobs.
Rating: 
Summary: A dud
Review: Trying to read it was a slow and painfull torture. I used to read IBM manuals in their glory mainframe days, so I am used to suffering. It reads like another pseudo scientific manifesto from the Developmentor group.
Rating:
Summary: Material haphazardly thrown together, LOTS of errors
Review: Very big disappointment, almost as big as Don Box's ego! Lotsof errors and inaccuracies, clearly written in haste to catch the XML bandwagon. The chapter on SOAP is ridiculous, in particular considering that Box was supposed to have been instrumental in the development of SOAP. I sure hope that's not the herald of the other books in the DevelopMentor series...
Rating:
Summary: Very Disappointing
Review: When I first heard of this book I was quite excited to get my hands on it. Don Box has authored or co-authored two of the best COM books out there (Essential COM and Effective COM). Aaron Skonnard writes excellent articles about XML for MSDN Magazine. How could this book fail to please? Well it does and it does so on several levels. This is a 370 page book. 100 pages are devoted to various appendices. This would be fine if the appendices were useful, instead you get 50 pages devoted to a print-out of the XML Infoset Working Draft from the W3C, which in the author's own words "is hopelessly out of date". The text itself is very much in a philosophical vein and provides very few insights into XML and its uses. There are also many, many errors throughout the text. Errors are of course understandable, but there is such a profusion of errors in some sections so as to make them almost unreadable (especially Chapter 3). The authors claim in the intro that a web site has been created to support this book. Well if you venture to this site you find a page with the single sentence "Thanks for buying the book!". How extremely helpful! Save your money and instead buy one of the Wrox books on XML.
Rating: 
Summary: This is a 5 star book, no doubt about it!!
Review: With all the lame-brained XML books available, this one truly stands out. It is not intended for the usual Wrox crowd, instead it is a book that is meant for the top-shelf! This is not a flavor of the month book. Buy it, read it, keep it, worship it!!!
Rating: 
Summary: When Essentials are required.
Review: Working on a tight schedule, we found this book very helpful in explaining the theory of XML and XSL, and the options available. In conjunction with Skonnard's online writing, we were able to find solutions to our enormous inherited problem within just a week. These could not have been solved with simple handy hints and examples of code, but required in depth understanding of the technology and its applications. Definitely one of the best books on XML we could find.
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