Rating: 

My biggest objection has to be that the author pads out the middle of the book with his own pet API, JDOM. This is not an "official" API (i.e. no independent implementation), it's not widely used, and it hasn't even made it through peer review. Nevertheless, it takes up a full chapter of the book, and most of the examples following that point are written in... well, guess. Begins with a J.

Following this stance, the book's stance on SAX and DOM seems to be written in part as polemic against their use. After a while, I started grinding my teeth every time I read about the wonders of JDOM.

The book has a tendency to repeat itself at times and feels as though too little editing done. There are parts of the book which are not "about" XML at all, but are about programs which use XML. Apache Xerces and Xalan were welcome additions to the book, but did we really need to read about JSP vs XSP and Cocoon? They actually detract from the book by telling only half the story -- I noticed that although the book talks about XSL to a large extent, the book is not clear on the performance & memory hit of using XSL as opposed to a SAX-like API.

I was looking for a complete, clear reference of SAX and DOM in this book, with examples of how they were used in parsing and possibly an annotated guide to how the specs came together. I didn't get it.