Rating: 

The exposition of often knotty and gnarled syntax and semantics is extremely lucid and precise. The authors often succeed in capturing the essence of a technique or procedure in a single well-crafted paragraph - even a sentence!

The examples are excellent - brief, well-focussed and relevant. As the authors state on p38 "we hope to shave some of the mystique off of XML processing - at the end of the day it's just pushing text around". And I think they (and Perl) succeed triumphantly.

Compared with most of the meandering, bloated and badly-written books abounding in the XML arena "Perl and XML" is a model production - and has less than 200 pages!