The author is well versed on the topic and the book reads like a
conversation. There is a lot of information contained within its 250
pages and I found the best way to read it was to read through it
completely, without trying to grab every term and concept. After
completing the book, you will have a very good idea what you can and
cannot accomplish with XSL-FO. You should then return to the book as
reference material, and more closely scrutinized the chapters that
pertain to the task at hand.
Within each chapter there are usually small tips and advise that will
help an unexperienced FO developer from spending too much time
attempting to force FO to do something that it cannot or was not meant
to do. A prior understanding of XSLT will be good before reading this book.
In the appendices is a nice comparison of the current FO Parsers and
toolkits. I recommend checking the website (http://www.dpawson.co.uk)
for more current information regarding FO Parsers.
Additionally, I applaud the author for choosing the GNU Free Document
License.
If you are looking for a quick start into XSL-FO, then this is not the
book for you. You will be better served reading the XSL-FO chapter in
"XML in a Nutshell" and then purusing a XSL-FO Cookbook or online
examples. However, if you want to really understand FO stylesheets and
master advanced usage, I recommend this book and the W3C specification
as your primary reading sources
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