Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When I first heard of this book I was quite excited to get my hands on it. Don Box has authored or co-authored two of the best COM books out there (Essential COM and Effective COM). Aaron Skonnard writes excellent articles about XML for MSDN Magazine. How could this book fail to please? Well it does and it does so on several levels. This is a 370 page book. 100 pages are devoted to various appendices. This would be fine if the appendices were useful, instead you get 50 pages devoted to a print-out of the XML Infoset Working Draft from the W3C, which in the author's own words "is hopelessly out of date". The text itself is very much in a philosophical vein and provides very few insights into XML and its uses. There are also many, many errors throughout the text. Errors are of course understandable, but there is such a profusion of errors in some sections so as to make them almost unreadable (especially Chapter 3). The authors claim in the intro that a web site has been created to support this book. Well if you venture to this site you find a page with the single sentence "Thanks for buying the book!". How extremely helpful! Save your money and instead buy one of the Wrox books on XML.