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I honestly feel this is the finest computing book that I have come across during my career (OK, so I've only been doing this for 2 years, but I feel really strongly about this book!). So many books struggle to cover numerous topics in limited space, so you'd think that relating the entire realm of XML in one book would be an impossible task - think again! The authors of this book do justice to all the common areas of XML usage such as parsing and validation; and some of those less widespread uses, e.g. web services provision, data binding and employment of XML for an application server.

The first half of this book illustrates the basic tools for dealing with XML in Java. Described as the 'absolute minimum' needed to understand and develop web applications, they draw upon solid and stable standards. The latter half of the book covers more exciting opportunities for XML and draws upon emerging technologies such as SOAP.

No areas were skimmed over - in fact, I felt each new concept introduced was accompanied by real-life, understandable and well-documented examples that really work. The accompanying CD contains all of the source code and the latest versions of all of the software that you will need to run the code and to start developing your own enterprise-standard web applications.

One of my worries when I started this book was that with 9 named authors, this book would suffer, as many do, from repetition and lack of coherence. My worries were unsubstantiated; the book benefits greatly from their apparent wide ranges of experience. I found it refreshing to read about XML technologies I may never previously have considered because Java books often concentrate on Sun or Apache technologies and on W3C options when it comes to XML.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to build upon his or her basic knowledge of XML and to explore and apply new concepts to real-world situations.