At the end of November, I received a copy of No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP, written by Thomas Myer, from Sitepoint Press. With our move to the Great White North in December and the recent holidays, I hadn't had a chance to crack the spine of the book... until my laptop died this weekend. While waiting for a new motherboard (sigh), I had a fine opprtunity to sit down and spend some quality time with the book today.
In a nutshell...
This is an excellent little book if you know your way around PHP but need to start working with XML and need some hands-on examples to complement theory. This book will give you a choice of tools: client-side XML manipulation with browser-based XSLT and EcmaScript DOM, or server-side XML manipulation with PHP extensions for SAX, DOM, SimpleXML, and XML-RPC, along with some criteria for determining which approach to use for different aspects of your project. Myer is an excellent, enjoyable writer, and the short, clear examples solidify his lessons. For the past few years my bible for XML reference material has been Elliot Rusty Harold's XML in a Nutshell, but No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP complements any reference book with its task-oriented introduction to a broad array of XML Web development technologies.
Update 2006-01-10
As a promotional offer, if you buy No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP though sitepoint.com you'll get a PHP quick reference poster along with your order. That's cool.
I also updated the title of the book to remove (Build Your Own)—that's the name of the series, not the subtitle. Amazon led me astray there... thanks to the nice Sitepoint person who pointed that out to me today.
