This book is mixed. I bought it really for an independent, more in-depth treatment of XPath. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are really good in that regard.
However, there are two BIG negatives to the book. First, THE EXAMPLES ARE NOT ON-LINE EVEN THOUGH THE PREFACE SUGGESTS THEY ARE. This is RIDICULOUS since particularly Chapter 5 is written as though you were interactively working the example. Chapters 3 and 4 are also best read interactively like this.
Second, the purpose of some of the other chapters is unclear or they could be better redacted with the reader who is not part of the small XPath cognoscenti in mind. Chapter one's treatment of the historical components of XPath seems a little like ancient history to me, and I am not sure what it adds.
Chapter two is a little disjoint. The style is deductive. For instance, the reader is told several papges in that he or she might have deduced that XPath supports 4 types. Well, why not just say that up front. It was also unclear why anyone would want to use a string in XPath the way it was explained here. Of course, you want to use strings in comparison operators all the time.
XLink and XPointer are still relatively immature. I might have suggested de-emphasizing them. Focusing chapters on non-XSLT applications that use XPATH might have been better. O'Reilly has really missed the boat in this regard. A lot of new interfaces are being built that allow XPath access to document trees. One of the most interesting of these is the Java Standard Tag Library. However, Bergsten's JavaServer Pages 2nd Edition barely touches the topic, perhaps because XPath belongs elsewhere. However, it is also not in the XPath book.
Wake-up! Expand the parts of this book that are good, and put examples on-line. Make it a book that hands-on people can really use.
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