Beginning VB.NET XML: Essential XML Skills for VB.NET Programmers

Showed some good practical examples. Maybe not enough to learn XML technolgies on its own, but it showsed how they can be used in .Net which was good.

I am very impressed with this book. It starts off by introducing XML in the first couple of chapters then spends three chapters of teaching the reader how to integrate .NET and XML. This gives a great grounding, allowing the reader to start to developing integrated solutions (such as the book's phone book app case study) after one hundred pages and to produce a fairly comprehensive site in just a couple of hundred pages. Although they are briefly mentioned in the initial chapters additional elements such as the DOM, XPath, XSLT, Schemas, ADO.NET and web services are given their own chapters later on. The book finishes by consolidating what the reader has learnt with a comprehensive case study. This segregation was very clear and appealed to me by allowing me to pick and choose from the technologies I was interested in (for instance as I often develop for Flash with XML I could skip over the two XSLT chapters because I use Flash to apply formatting). I am thoroughly impressed with this book because of its clear delivery. I am a real fan of .NET anyway and the authors have managed to put across in a very clear way just how simple it can be to develop with these two technologies. And just to cap it all, as if I am not taken enough with this book it even regularly refers to Edinburgh, my home town, in its examples! I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who is taking their first steps in using XML with VB.NET and wants to take their skills to the intermediate level. Mike Poole