BOOK REVIEW
Professional XML for .Net Developers	Wrox Press
Dinar Dalvi, Joe Gray, Bipin Joshi, Fredrik Normen, Francis Norton, Andy Olsen, J. Michael Palermo IV, Darshan Singh, John Slater, Kevin Williams	ISBN: 1861005318

Category					Rating
LEGEND:	5=Excellent	4=Good	3=Standard	2=Fair	1=Poor
Overall recommendation					4
Quality of organization					4
Easy to read and navigate					4
Sufficient quantity of examples					3
Examples are error free					5
Reuse for reference					5
Quality of index					5

Summary Review

Very helpful to learn the ins and outs of using XML in .Net. This book is great for developers who already know XML and the .Net Framework.

Detailed Comments 

The overall quality of the book is great. It has many so-called "real world" code samples to help you practice as you read. I don't know if I would call them "real world" but they are good enough to help you learn. The book is very well organized and covers many topics from reading and writing XML files to showing you some ADO.NET and ASP.NET. It also has a small portion on web services and SOAP.

The only problem I had with the book was that the code samples were not consistent. There are many samples that have both a C# and VB version but some have only one. For example, a Case Study they have which is a DVD Rental System is written only in VB.NET. For a C# programmer, that means you have to re-write the code for C# yourself just to run the sample. This does not take so long but you should not have to do all that.

Personally, I think they should have made the book shorter by only using one language, C# of course as this is the language of choice for the .NET framework. But I guess they had to make the book for everyone.

I strongly recommend that you know XML and a .NET programming language before picking up this book, otherwise, you will be completely lost.

Reviewer:

Elmer Morales

Date:

9/16/02