Customer comments on this selection.
 A vague introduction, easily beaten by the sketchiest source on the web
The book is written in a very boring English. The authors tries to describe everything in text, whereas a simple example would have gone a long way.
The examples are scarce inside the text. Well, at least "good examples" are... Whenever he reaches the simple concepts such as parsed entities, he gives a couple of examples, but for more complicated such as unparsed, the examples are vague and trivial.
The same goes for explaining the attributes. CDATA is explained thoroughly (as in all other resources available on the web), but ID, IDREF, NMTOKEN,... just mentioned in one line, without a single example. I had to spend a lot of time surfing the web to find some clear explanations.
You could argue that he was trying to present a brief introduction. Well, that's not exactly true. He tries to touch everything in the least clear way possible.
There are tons of better books on XML out there. Don't waste your time and money.
 Dry but clear, and a bit longer than 10 minutes
The real title should be "Learn all about what XML is, with a few examples, in a bit over 3 hours, ten minutes at a time." But that wouldn't sell the book by its cover. Very clear, following the "tell you, tell you, told you" style. A bit dry but mostly very easy learning since it's in ten-minute chunks. Takes the mystery out of XML. Opens your eyes to all that it can do. Finally makes clear what a "DOM" is (document object model.
 Learn the basics ?
The author uses lots of phrases which are explained very quickly, and to vague to be of much use. This is a book for beginners, and you wont come very far reading this book, but you might, perhaps, learn the basics.
Really bad
I've been a software engineer for 20+ years. This is the worst technical book that I can recall. Way too many forward references - "Now I'll use a technical term that I won't explain for another two chapters".Most technical books have some forward references but this is ridiculous. To make it worse, some of the terms are never clearly explained even when you get to that section of the book.
Fall asleep in 10 minutes
I have tried to read this book over the course of two weeks, I can't get more than a couple pages without nearly passing out. This thing reads like stereo instructions. I can not comment on how accurate the information is, as the author is so boring, I can't retain any of it. No specific examples, all very vauge references.
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