Rating: 

This book is Superb!

Its a concise introduction which assumes you can think, have programmed before and are in a hurry. Dont avoid this book if you have only used say C/C++, not java - its still mostly applicable, and easy to read the Java samples anyway.

It raises some great ideas that you may have been on the verge of discovering yourself - or have even implemented your own way, less nicely - such as pipelining.

The author has obviously used all the parsers out there, and mentions the odd bug that could save you a lot of hairpulling. It would seem the author has a preference for gnu tools and an aversion for the complexity of the DOM model - which I would value after working thru the book.

The only detractor is the presence of a few typos - he covers the important stuff and there is _no_ crud.

[ps. Ive been developing for 10 years, and am using xml pipelining and SAX2 to do a port of a bank intranet site, which I previously wrote in C]