Rating: 

I've been a devoted fan of O'Reilly publications ever since the nutshell books were small, and bound with 2 staples. The reason for my longstanding loyalty to them is their loyalty to me, the technical audience. Their books are well written, entertaining, factual, accurate, and easily absorbed.

This book (although probably better than most on the market) does not measure up to the high standards I normally associate with books from O'Reilly and Associates. Although I am only a beginner (the target for the book), I found numerous syntax and logic errors in the examples. But more importantly, in a book that's about transforming an input tree into an output tree, the trees are often notably lacking. All that's presented is the transformation(XSLT). That doesn't work as a training example. It's like a diet commercial that shows only the pill, but no "before" or "after" pictures. Yeah, the pill (in this analogy, XSLT) is interesting, but since it's a translator from input to output, I'm left imagining what they look like. Having them as easy references would have been extremely helpful to me as I worked through the transformation.

Furthermore (and I'll agree that this is an ill-defined issue) the text seemed too text-y and prone to discussion. What I liked about previous O'Reilly books (Perl especialy) is that the _discussion_ is wrapped around good _examples_ of the language. The *examples* are the point, and the discussion supports them. Not so in this XML book. In this book, the discussions were often not supported by examples. Again, I have to create a picture in my own mind rather than absorbing the example that should have been placed in the book. Because there were more discussions than actual examples, I felt that I had to work really hard to understand the concepts. In contrast, the examples from other books seemed to make it more cranio-available (i.e. readily absorbed) to me. I can't exactly put my finger on the source of this difficulty, but the symptom for me is that I was more tired and less confident of my skills when I put this book down than when I've put other books down. That feeling - easily absorbed material instilling confidence - is why I've loved O'Reilly books in the past. This book (while it *did* help me learn XML) did *not* leave me with that O'Reilly feeling.

I'll try other XML books from O'Reilly as reference now that I've finished the tutorial, but in the mean time, I can't recommend this book. And it brings me sorrow to have to single this book out. It's the first disappointment from O'Reilly in our long relationship.