There are already lots of 5 stars here and it seems unnecessary to vote another 5 stars. Anyway, I would like to give some personal feedback.
1)This book is short in length but rich in content.
Chapter 1 convers XML in a standalone java application, SAX parser is used in this chapter; chapter 2 shows a survex project using SAX parser and servlet; chapter 3 demonstrated how to use DTD, CSS within XML editor XMetal; chapter 4 covers XML publishing, same content can be published with different style sheets for HTML, WML and RSS; chapter 5 and chapter 6 describe the conversion between XML and EDI using xsl; chapter 7 is devoted to an e-Business project, using xsl and servlet; chapter 8 can be read after chapter 4, it is also devoted to publishing, with dynamically generated xml content; chapter 9 is devoted to a stock tracking project, which uses SOAP as the communication protocol, it can be read after chapter 7.
In a whole, this book covers:
a) XML parsers in chapter 1, 2, also java, servlet, design patterns Builder, Visitor.
b) XML editor in chapter 3, also CSS, DTD,
c) Publishing (XSLT) in chapter 4 and 8, also servlet.
d) XML and EDI in chapter 5 and 6, also XSLT.
e) e-Business: chapter 7 and 9, also servlet, SOAP.
2)This books is written for java developer, good understanding of java and servlet is required.
3)There is no chapter on JSP and XML, although there are application of XML with servlet and you can transfer some servlet into JSP; there is no chapter on JMS and XML neither, you may hope to find this kind of example in a JMS book.
4)This book is surpringly easy to use. I read it several times, from the beginning to the end. I tried EVERY EXAMPLE in the book, and every example works.
To be more honest, I only find one problem in the example (I just want to prove that I really tried every example): on page 81, third paragraph, first line, the author talks about how to chnage display style in XMetal:
Choose Tools, Editor Display Style
I found "Editor Display Style" in the menu "Format" instead of menu "Tools", so maybe we shuld replace "Tools" by "Format".
5)This book uses a JDBC database HypersonicSQL, and it is on the CD. So no preinstalled database is required.
6)The servlet container used in the book is jetty, the author provided batch file to use it without any difficulty. However, if you use Tomcat or Weblogic or jrun or another servlet engine, you need to configure it.
