Out of Date
It is not often I pass a hard judgement on something. I read some excerpts on the web and bought this book in hopes it was very authoritive. Most of the code examples did not work, even after I downloaded the errata. I had to have one window open on the W3C site in order to track the errors and to get some example to work. When the author went the VB examples, there was no lead in. I recommend the authors' website, but not this book.
poor reference
This really is a poor reference and tutorial. But...
I haven't found anything better.
Who's definition of "in-depth" are we using?
After a mere twenty-two pages into the book, I was starting to doubt the usefulness of this book. The very top of page 22 talks about "examples above" on handling special characters. Flip back to page 21, however, go to the bottom of the page and read about examples that "are described below". I give up, are the examples on the magical page 21 1/2?While other reviewers seem willing to let slide the number of typos, omitions and code examples that simply don't work, I am less forgiving. I got this book on the assumption that I would be able to learn how to integrate XML with my knowledge of ASP. Most examples in this book, however, are for Visual Basic, and while that only requires little to moderate tweaking, the pure ASP examples in this book are almost non-existant.
Add in the fact that the book constantly interrupts a lesson to add new concepts we're supposed to either immediately understand, or bookmark and thumb through the book hoping they remembered to include the examples, makes this a frustrating book to learn from. Doing a quick search on Google for "XML help basics" gave me more insight into XML in just a few minutes than reading this book for a few hours did.
Close....but yet so frustrating
I agree with a number of other reviewers, skip this book. It is more frustrating than it's worth. Shame too, cause it starts out strong and then just fades away.Code Examples are REDUNDANT.
Code Examples are INCOMPLETE in the book. (Even the "Complete" examples. Had to download the source code and go line by line to figure out what was "missing". VERY FRUSTRATING.
Book skips arround quite a bit and is confusing at times. The Summary Case (3 tier architecture) which I was looking forward to was pretty much......um USELESS.
Oh well, I didn't listen to the others, maybe you will listen to me. Take a pen, paper and write down the 3 useful pages in this book and save your money.
A good start on XML
This book doesn't cover all detailed XML is got for you, and it doesn't intend to either. However, Wilson's book gave me a good foundation to explore the XML world. Good choice if you want to start nice and simple, and then focus on details later. Don't get me wrong, this is not a brochure either; it does come with plenty source code and examples.
(34 reviews)
