Using XML: Special Edition (with CD-ROM) - Softcover

In that sense, Using XML serves quite well. But if you're looking for a tutorial, this book will simply look up at you with a kind of confused "Pikachu"-style expression and wonder what you're looking for specifically.

If you don't know what to tell it, you're in trouble.

The book delves into the programming realm--where its strength lies, incidentally--after a couple of obligatory "Intro to XML" chapters. Because XML, being a comparatively simple language, is more frequently about understanding when or why to use a particular feature than how, there is comparatively little code (though there's certainly enough of it to go around). Instead, most of the text explains concepts and gives examples of when it is and isn't appropriate to use certain features, what certain features are intended to be used, and so on, which is very helpful. After all, in many cases the reader will be using the book to try to find solutions and not simply answers. The writing is clear and concise--well, as clear and concise as you can be when venturing into the oft-nebulous areas of XML--when describing code functions and real-life examples, but, as stated, this book is fairly weak on XML concepts. If you didn't understand the concept going in, you're not likely to be much wiser on the other side of the chapter.

There is code galore, however, and much of it is notated, as it should be. As would be expected in a reference book, there are pages and pages and pages of tables with classes and features and commands aplenty. Unfortunately, there are several code samples from real-world Web sites or actual working models. This is "unfortunate" mainly because the samples point to the lack of usable examples in the book. A lot of XML's advanced functions would be made a lot clearer if the book would not only give isolated code fragments for many XML features, but also a wider-scale XML page that would let the reader understand how it's used in the field.

This is by no means a tutorial, and if you're fuzzy on critical XML philosophies, you may want another book. But if you're an XML developer working on a project who needs something to pull off the shelf from time to time, this is fine. --William Steinmetz

Lee Anne Phillips has been involved in data processing and networking since that happy day the professor of her first programming class at UC Berkeley persuaded her that she had a talent for this stuff and should rethink her planned career in linguistic psychology and tweak bits instead. From UCB she traveled through various incarnations as a mainframe systems programmer, firmware designer, network engineer, software architect, programming and project manager, and finally consultant until she just had to tell somebody about it. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area¿her place of birth¿has a bachelor's degree in computer science, and has a great sense of humor. Visit her Web page at leeanne/.