Rather incomplete and example- rather than axiom-based, this book did little but confuse me and send me lurching back to the web. I believe I acquired it via trading a six-pack of Newcastle to David Maynor many years ago, as I'd never have bought a computer book so clearly non-mathematical in its leanings. Furthermore, the author is Eric T. Ray, which is a bit too close -- a single-step translation and a contiguous deletion of degree 4, as we say in the protein-sequencing racket -- to venerable blowhard Eric S. Raymond for comfort.
I recently dove into a web development project using XML for the first time and gleaned a lot from various tutorials on the web and other Googling. This book was what brought all that together in my brain and helped me solidify my understanding of XML, especially the nuances of XPath. I haven't read it all the way through but it serves as an excellent reference for me as I learn and experience more about XML technology.
It was a pretty good introduction to XML and transformations, but some of the explanations were backwards (i.e. starting with how to do something rather than what it describes). Some of his information went too in-depth and a bit off-topic (e.g. spending too many pages describing css). Otherwise, it really helped me better understand certain issues concerning XML creation.
Good book describing XML from the beginning, its capabilities and limitations, overviewing basic XML-applications and technologies like XPath, XSLT etc. and different XML-processing tools to use in programs.
Seemed like more of a reference book than a beginner book. Many of the examples made assumptions about your level of understanding with other programming languages. Some of the information was good, but I found myself using another beginning book and the web more often.
Unfortunately, this is considerably out of date, so the part about XSL will need to be supplemented. I'm tired of reading about document formatting right now, though, so that will have to wait.