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Rating: - A questionable book...
After all the flaky reviews this book has received, I was unsure if I was reading individual marketing campaigns sponsored by the various publishers or actual reviews. It seems that people cannot simply agree that this book is good or is bad as there is just nothing in between. Even in all the review cases, many people didn't find the reviews helpful, both positive and negative. It all seems complex from the consumer's perspective when deciding to buy this book.

So given all these statements, I thought I'd present a true review - one from an actual reader rather than from someone else. I think it's pretty safe to assume that this book is good for some people and bad for others. The problem is that the reviews already here have so much fluff that they didn't even begin to describe themselves, thus they could be ambitious or lazy, smart or dim, and hobbyist or entrepreneurs. There is simply no way of telling.

Personally, I think many of these concepts can be learned in PHP in about 2-3 days of trying the APIs out if you already know a great deal of XML. So if I'm going to buy a book on PHP and XML, I expect that it will provided added value information as well as design decisions, business concerns and best practices. Examples are not what I care about as much as the rich and deep information because there are many examples already on the web - no point acquiring the book just for those alone. That makes me question the reviewers who say the examples are clear and concise - the examples on the web already do that. Books are supposed to provide added value to these APIs and examples to make the topic complete and valuable to the reader. The book should also scale well to both beginning audiences (this book does very well) to expert audiences that want to drill through the basic information like APIs and examples and learn more advanced techniques, best practices, etc. This book doesn't deliver on these areas very well unfortunately.

So, for a person like me: This book receives 2 stars. I didn't learn all that much from it and I was disappointed to say the least. He's a good writer, funny at times, and knows what he is doing, but he also catered to a specific audience and it shows. Is that the goal? Probably. But I think the expert people shouldn't have expected too much (as I did) - that's the truth.

Although I personally give this book 2 stars, I believe that many beginner PHP programmers who have a little idea to what XML is will benefit from it. If you've already read some XML material on the net and even read a book or two, this book won't exactly help you out too much. However, this segment is rather small I would believe. I'm still looking for a book that I can give to my employees for reference as well as added value information. When I find it, I'll put a review there as well so you can compare.

So there you have it - an honest review. I hope it helps people out in their purchasing decisions.

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Rating: - One of the best XML and PHP titles
Most XML books suffer from painful verbosity. Useful information on a relatively simple subject tends to be hidden in drifts of useless cruft.

This book focuses on the core information needed to become competent using XML and PHP together. While it is not the most comprehensive reference on XML available, it is the first resource that I check.

(Disclosure: I worked on this book project as a technical reviewer - take what I say with your own grain of salt. :)

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Rating: - Finally a good XML book for PHP developers
XML is technology that has been around for several years now. PHP has been capable of dealing with XML for different purposes. Oddly, before this book there was little or no books at all specifically about developing with XML in PHP.

After reading the book you can realize why there were not really many books filling this void. It is that it is not really easy to write a good PHP book on XML because you need to know so much about both things to write such a valuable book as this. Congratulations for Vikram for having done it first and so well.

....

While many publishers insist on hiding the information to access book the authors, certainly these forums are good example of how you can get further value from a book beyhond the hundreds of pages of printed paper that you paid for.

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Rating: - Readable, clear, and useful
An extremely helpful introduction to several salient technologies for PHP developers.

It gives enough discussion into several XML/PHP technologies to allow you to a) understand what the technologies aims are b) how it can be used and c) if the technology is right for your application. It gives you enough of a boost into the technology so that you avoid wasting time developing with an irrelevant technology, and go straight to what is best for your own project.

The book can be skimmed very effectively by reading just the well commented and frequent source code listings, reverting to the adjacent paragraphs of text where more explanation is needed.

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Rating: - Lots Of Good Content, Examples
i have bought both the wrox book and this one and much prefer this one. while the wrox book is good, i find this one to be much easier to understand, and to use as a base for my own projects. i am building an XML-based transaction server, and the chapters on DOM, WDDX and SOAP were very useful, as i was able to use some of the code from the book in my project without any difficulty. also i appreciated the chapters on using open-source alternatives to the built-in functions (this is again not available in wrox, which also tended to be infuriatingly vague at certain points).

if you are a serious developer, i would recommend buying both books - i refer to both the wrox book and this one since neither one is exhaustive - but i learnt more from this one, as it is written in a clearer manner.