Title: You can't always judge a book by its table of contents.
Product review: I was looking for an introductory book on XML and decided to pick up a copy of Mastering XML after reading the introduction and perusing the table of contents. The book covers a great deal of topics, but almost all of it is poorly explained and most of the examples are not very illustrative of the related material. The author tends to describe things in a round about way and has a habit of throwing in material that isn't covered until later in his explanations. I tried reading ahead in some cases, but those sections weren't covered any more clearly so it turned into a vicious cycle. I finally had to stop reading after 400 pages. I have a background in web development with HTML, JavaScript, Java servlets, and JSP, but I would not recommend this book as a first on XML. It might serve as a reference though.
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