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Book Review: Just XML

I bought this book in July 1999 after comparing it to many others on the market and reading Amazon comments like this one. This book has many virtues and many shortcomings. John Simpson is an entertaining writer, and one gets the sense he is just as fascinated by the content of his example XML document (B films) as XML programming itself. The book explains things extraordinarily well, although from the first 75 pages one might think that Simpson is perhaps simplifying too much (after all, most of his readers probably have a good foundation already in HTML to pick up this book). The other Amazon comments by professional programmers criticize the book for not being a good reference guide, for not describing enough detail and for getting sidetracked by miscellaneous non-programming related topics. These complaints are valid to an extent, but they miss the point. This is a good book for an introduction to the basic commands and some of the advanced ones. It's to be assumed that after reading this kind of book, the reader could find additional reference material from XML Bible or the W3 website.

I thought the main example used throughout the book really explained the concepts well, and I appreciate how carefully the author tried to discuss topics that might be subject to revision by future W3 recommendations. I also appreciate how the author, anticipating possible exasperation with his film digressions, boxed them in, so they could be easily skipped over in reading (heck, I might even read them later). I have two major complaints. First, it's unfortunate that the book is not connected to a supplemental website with XML updates, corrections, code and tutorials. I am reading, Joe Burns' "JavaScript Goodies,". It contains problems, exercises and answers from the book. Perhaps future editions might be encouraged to emphasized the tutorial aspect more so than the reference guide aspect. Another "complaint" is that the book is shorter than it is. Although 376 pages, the first 40 or 50 pages were overview, every chapter had its own glossary, there were several half-blank pages at ends of chapters and some of the discussions of XML development tools seem to be outdated by now. (These might be better addressed on an accompanying web page). So what you're getting in reality is 225-250 of excellent explanation. Definitely well worth the money