"XML Hacks" book review

"XML Hacks" by Michael Fitzgerald is not a newly published book (July 2004), it just sometimes happens when your reading queue is implemented as a priority queue and you read not what you'd like to but what you have to. My overall final rating is . That's the first book in O'Reilly's Hacks Series I've read and basically I like this format. The book consists of 100 real-world XML "hacks" - quick and clever solutions for particlular practical XML-related problems.

What I like about the book. Surprisingly it's not only for Linux and Java guys. Processing XML with .NET and C# is covered well too. The whole chapter devoted to XSLT and another to RSS/Atom is just great idea. The variety of topics is amazing - just take a look at the table of contents. The hacks are written in article style - short, to the point and it's fun to read.

What I dislike. The target audience is too wide - from XML newbies to experts, so XML experts would find many "advanced" hacks like "Processing XML with SAX" too boring and newbies could find hacks like "From Wiki to XML Through SGML" too complicated. But for intermediate XML developers it should be just fine. Hack #98, "Processing XML with C#" demonstrates writing XML with ugly string concatenation just after describing XmlTextWriter, weird.