Terse, and too many typos!

I'm not very far along in the book, but I don't like what I'm seeing.
The preface purports that the book's audience need not "know anything
about XML." There is very little in the way of explaining XML, however.
The chapter on "Fundamentals" is O'Reilly at its most terse. If you already
understand XML very well, you might think this chapter an excellent
itemizing of the specification. Sadly, most people, I imagine, would be able
to retain little from this.

Regarding the code examples, the explanations hardly illuminate the API.
The code stands as is; and the commentary does only a somewhat decent job
of explaining the larger context. You could always check the documentation
given in the back of the book, but that's hardly as helpful as a good overview
and commentary.

Moreover, and in some ways worse, I have found many typos -- and I am only
as far as the first two examples. These mistakes include missing import
statements, errant capitalization, bad indentation, double underscores ('__')
written as one long underscore. This is unacceptable. I can only hope it is just
this one chapter.

I bought this book because of the topics, and because I figured Python would
be the easiest way to learn XML API's. I am only hoping that the book will
get better, and that I will be able to derive benefit from it. As it stands,
I'm skeptical that I will get my money's worth.

Other Reviews

• A Great Overview of XML
• Great coverage with some typos
• Good Coverage of Python XML possibilities
• Terse, and too many typos!