Not worth the time, not worth the money
I bought this book based on the 4.5 stars that the original reviews had given it. It must have the author's friends. None of the examples work and could never work no matter what platform. It is obvious that the author never actually worked through these issues although it looks good enough that it faked me out. Examples: he uses virtual base classes as if they were implementation classes (DOMImplementation class), he uses methods that dont exist (System.out.null()), he fails to declare or instantiate items that he uses in the examples, ..., ..., ... It took me a month to work my own way through the 2nd chapter. Not worth the time, not worth the money.
disappointing
The book isn't really for beginners. I don't think Java beginners can make sense of the Reflection or servlet code. The XML/XSLT part is hard to follow even after you've already read other books on the subject. The site [url] doesn't seem to exist (I tried on Oct 12 and Oct 13, 2002), so there's no source code available to download. If you're serious about Web Services I recommend you look at Jesse Liberty's books on C# and .Net instead.
Out of Date?
This book is full of good information about XML and Java, and almost any developer using XML for the first time would find it useful. However, I think it is a little out of date. A lot of the "extension" packages it talks about have actually been encorportated into the Java platform in one way or another, and there are a few new XML-Java initiatives that it does not cover. Also, some of the examples in the book are a bit contrived, and not very practical for real world applications. But on the whole, I think this is a very good introduction to the subject.
Save your money unless your going to use it as a reference
Making a claim to be the Java, XML, and Web Services Bible is a big one, and one that this book fails to deliver on. While the author clearly knows the subject matter, his coverage of the basics is sometimes terse and confusing. I have some familiarity with xml, but the author takes just over 200 pages covering xml, xsl with Xalan, and xslt. Considering the scope of the subject, the author would have been better served to split this book into 3 or 4 volumes and cover the material more in depth in each volume. As it stands, the book lightly covers the basics then moves into more advanced examples, giving a feeling of being rushed through the material.
However rushed the book may feel, it is organized in a logical manner from start to finish. Although there is a slight detour in the middle of the book to cover the fairly new SVG, each section of the book builds upon the preceding sections. But I found that at the end of sections that I wasn't familiar with already, I felt lost because I hadn't been adequately prepared.
I was dissappointed with the sample code also. The code was written using software from the Apache Project, which was fine, but like most software books, the code was outdated before it was published. While the code was written using older versions of Xalan, Cocoon, and others, I also found that many of the samples didn't work. The sourcecode is downloadable from the publisher's site (no cd), but there are no compiled versions of the samples. There is supposedly an updated version of the sample code in a zip file, but that turned out to be fairly buggy as well.
If any of these technologies is new to you, I suggest you spend more money on other books because this one will only confuse you. If you are familiar with most of what's in here already and need an all-in-one reference or refresher without spending a lot of money, this would be the book for you.
Sloppy editing, otherwise not really bad
I bought this book for its sections on XML-RPC, SOAP and such. It had no in-depth coverage of these topics, but the overview wasn't too bad. However, the editing is bad, so you have contradictory sentences, even on the same page. Also the examples have lots of problems. If you want to use this book to get some overview, it's ok, but don't rely on it as the final word.
(10 reviews)
