Rating: 
Summary: Good but needs to be compacted.
Review: The author seemed very knowledgeable. The author takes a high level approach. He talks about numerous acronyms in the vaguest of terms only much later refining and giving details. It comes off sounding like ad copy. Very broad, not enough depth. Also spends a lot of time talking about what direction he is going, i.e. "from this point onward we will focus on ...". I found this really irritating.
Rating:
Summary: Brief Introduction
Review: Just scratching the surface of XML & JAVA. There is more than XML can do with Java that will blow your top away!
Rating: 
Summary: Good book to learn on how to use XML with Java
Review: Needs some XML specs companion though. I use the XML annoted specs but even on-line w3 docs would do. Very good approach and style to teach you how to move on the next (current?) big thing after Java. Follow the author's recommendation and don't go to the MS XML implementation that deliberately stays away from the standard. One regrettable thing about this book : The numerous and good examples don't come on an accompagned CD with the book. So I got to type these while I just got the book before my 12 hours flight took off. If you are on leach to a desktop/server or better wireless network, then no problem. If not then make sure you download from the ora web site to your laptop before leaving on a trip.
Rating: 
Summary: Is this book for "JDOM" publicity?
Review: I bought this book having read the raving reviews and that it is from o'reilly. What I found was that it covers "could be" and "may be" APIs that are used to extensively in the book. Some cases in point are: JDOM api - which is still in beta form and DOM level 2 - which is not yet adopted with confidence to write production level applications. I was expecting that the author would discuss writing applications using popularly used "industry standard" APIs. This is not to say JDOM and DOM level 2 are not promising, but not yet!
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I was able to read the book cover-to-cover in 2 days. The author has put efforts to make the book flow nicely. He builds the chapters in sequential manner. At the end, you have a very good understanding of all the XML related buzzwords and you have a clear picture on how to apply various XML related technologies. Also, the author provides insight into several open-source projects related to Java & XML. The best XML book I have read so far !!
Rating:
Summary: Great subject for small audience
Review: When I first saw this book the title and publisher immeadiately grabbed my attention. My regard for O'Reilly Publishers is so high I will often purchase books from them without checking reviews. The subject matter is not many authors are willing to tackle. Not many people can compitently write a book about Java programming for XML. The audience for this book is unique though. You must know Java and not know XML. If you don't fit both qualifications this book is probably not for you. Being a beginner Java programmer, I struggled a little with the code, but I was able to keep up after a couple reads through some chapters. All in all this is a great book and I reccomend it to those programmers who think their brains aren't full enough already.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: Hello every body I am a grad student at Mizzou working on my Masters project. when I started to learn XML, this was the first book that my brother gave me. I started using it and I was totally lost initially. There is an example on SAX that goes 2-3 pages (most part of it being comments and event handlers) which scared me off for a month. Then I learnt about the various parsers and DOM and SAX APIs etc. I got back to this book and now I guess that this is the finest book that I could lay my hands on! Make sure that you familiarize yourself with the XML JAVA terminology when you use this book. Kalyan
Rating:
Summary: Thorough and worthwhile
Review: This is an extremely good book, especially compared to some of the other XML books out there that I've looked at--many seem surprised that you would be curious about actually using XML programmatically, instead of just typing it up and viewing it in a browser. If you don't know where to start with XML, this book will give you a thorough introduction--in fact, if you do know a decent amount about XML, you may want to skim the first couple of chapters, since they are so thorough. But as soon as you get into the code with the SAX, DOM, etc. (don't worry if you don't know what those mean yet--buy the book!), it will have you working with XML programmatically in no time. I found it easy, using this book as a guide, to determine which of several parsing strategies to employ. The book spends a lot of time comparing and contrasting different options. It also did discussing DTDs and Schemas thoroughly, and did a good job of highlighting the substantial (and important) differences. The book was not a definitive reference on transforming XML with XSL or on generating XML programatically. If you want to generate reasonable HTML from XML with XSL, this book should tell you how to do it. If you want to understand the full power of XSLT, you're going to need a book on XSLT, which seems reasonable. I was more surprised that generating XML programmatically wasn't covered more thoroughly. There was a chapter on the subject with a small example using DOM to generate XML, but with all the talk about using XML as a data exchange format, I would have expected there to be some code that generated XML working with JDBC and a large amount of data. The book was smart enough to point out that large quantities of data can't all simply be handled in memory, but didn't discuss a streaming approach to writing XML. I ended up writing my own custom XML generation code--it wasn't that hard given a good grounding in object-oriented programming, but I'm still surprised there was no mention of this. Still, this was by far the best book on the market, and it did teach me everything I needed to know on the subject to do what I needed to do. I would recommend this book very highly to anyone who needs to understand how to use XML in Java, regardless of their experience level with XML.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended! Best book on using Java with XML yet.
Review: This is the only book that teaches you how to actually write code with Java and XML. It covers important technologies like the Apache Xalan, Xerces and Sun's JAXP. Unlike other books on XML this one is really practical (without all the theory :)). Infact, I learned more XML from this one book than any other book that pretend to teach you XML! If you are a Java developer working with XML, buy this book!
Rating:
Summary: 4 stars but still the best book
Review: The book woths 4 stars because:
-Contains real world examples
-Discusses open-source projects like Cocoon, JDOM, Enhydra.
-Helpful for an introduction to XML usage with Java
-Covers both DTDs and Schemas. The book misses 1 star becuse:
-I was expecting to see something about XML and data binding. (IMHO) if you want to write XML capable Java applications, this book seems to be the best choice for a rapid introduction.
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