xml

Professional XML (Programmer to Programmer)
$49.99
When I was trying to pick a book to fill in the gaps (chasms) in my XML experience, I routed around in the amazon percentage, (what percent of people bought this book, what percent bought other books.) This one seemed to have a good go-to ratio, and on one of the other books, the review referred to this one. I bought it second hand and got an excellent price. I am pleased. It reads easily and has a useful index.

With that said, this 800+ page book includes:

XML Basics: Syntax, Editors, Other tools
Presentation: XHTML and CSS
XML-FO
Defining Structure: DTDs and Schemas (and Relax NG)
XML as Data: the template translator XSLT, XPath, and XQuery
XML in the Data Tier, relation to relational DBs
Programming XML: the XML Document Object Model (DOM), Simple API for XML (SAX) ,and yes Ajax, XML and .Net, XML and Java, Python, Ruby, and Perl
XML Services: RSS and Atom, Web services
SOAP and WSDL:
Advanced Web services
more stuff including 30 pages of XML in Office Development.

XML For Dummies
$24.99
I'm in an online publishing class at a tech university with NO background in anything like this. This book saved me! It explains all so well, and allows LOTS of practice as you read. I can't understand the negative reviews.

XML Problem Design Solution (Programmer to Programmer)
$34.99
Everybody or most of everybody that are in web design in some form or another have heard about XML or even used it a bit. But personally I feel there are a small amount of resources out there that really teach you how to use XML in "real-world" scenarios. It's nice to know what it is and know that many applications use it behind the scenes, but it still doesn't help people understand how to use it for our own web applications.

This book solves that problem wonderfully by first showing you first what XML is and how to format proper XML documents. Then the author discusses how to publish XML documents in a couple web site examples (web catalog for one) and showing how to style these documents using regular CSS and XSLT, schemas as well as other technologies such as XPath and XQuery.

Each chapter presents a new problem (rendering XML to print, searching and merging documents, integrating web services, RSS feeds) and goes through step by step in how to work it out with really nice code examples. You really don't need to read this book end to end to get the most out of it. Just pick a chapter and read through it since the author re-summarizes what was previously covered to bring you up to speed.

So for example, if you have XML documents that you need to integrate into a database (DB2, SQL Server, etc) or want to learn how to create XML documents from a database table(s) it first shows the necessary SQL to pull the data you need, then how to use various tools to create your format.

The book does use one program (Stylus Studio 2006) in particular but the author mentions other open-source programs that you can use as well (in Appendix too). A great little book (under 300 pages) that shows you some great uses for XML as well as teaching you how and why you should use it.

A great buy!

Beginning XML Databases (Wrox Beginning Guides)
$39.99
I work with a lot of school leavers and people outside IT and often have to advise them on how to empower themselves in IT in the right way. Surely SQL and databases are one of the first topics people should understand. HTML was also high on the list. With this book, the author has combined all of them in one making it a very relevant combination for today's beginner. I will recommend this book to school leavers, financial people and people outside IT wanting to empower themselves quickly. Another great advantage of XML and databases is the platform independence. Very well done to the author for combining these topics at the entry level in such an easiliy understandable way!