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.NET and XML Review by A. Alvarez
Very Disappointed
Note that I decided to write this review because I could not believe that so many people wrote so nice reviews about this book. My assumption is that someone or some people are really trying to sell this book, because this book is definitely not that good whatsoever.
Actually, this book is definitely not what I expected from a .NET/XML book. I was expecting a practical book with some theory, a good description about .NET's XML implementation and good examples. This is not what this book included. I'm very flexible with books. It's impossible that every book will be perfect. Actually, most aren't, so you have to get used to it, but again this book is for the most part terrible, unless you only want to get a general idea of how to use XML with .NET, otherwise get a different book. Again, I don't know where the reviews for this book came from, because this book is really not that good.
To name a couple of things that I find wrong with the book, lets start with the examples included. Two words: they suck! Each chapter is pretty much like this: here is the general theory, some of it unnecessary like the constant reference to W3C stuff; then, here are a few lame, simple examples without much substance; now, lets go to the next chapter.
The first time I looked inside the book I was looking for information about how .NET did Xml Validation, and it is just terrible. I actually found more information out of general .NET books I already had, than from this one. And when you are working on a project where you need this information, and you have a book that's suppose to help you with this stuff, it is very disappointing to find out that the book is pretty much irrelevant.
You would assume validation is a very important XML topic, among many others, but there's really not a lot of info on it. Actually, if you look on the book's index, you'll see that about half the related info is in the reference section, which you could get out of MSDN anyway. BTW, almost half of the book is simply reference for the different .NET XML namespaces. Again, the same data you could get out of MSDN.
In any case, I know there's not much else to choose from, but pretty much anything else might be as good or possibly way better...