Raw

A courier just brought me a box full of these, or rather I had to walk down to the piazza to collect. First impressions - heavy! (smart courier).

Second impressions - Wiley have made some minor changes to the old Wrox style, new cover typefaces, it somehow looks a bit cheaper than these books used to.

Third impressions - how much?! The thing is only $39.99 (£26.99) for 1032 pretty information-dense pages. Just checked and the nearest in size I have on the shelf is Pro XML from a few years ago, $59.99. So it actually is cheaper than they used to be - general marketing strategy I guess.

Fourth impressions - looks good. Impressively broad coverage, all the main programming languages catered for, all the XML technologies I expected plus a chapter on Relax NG and one on XForms I hadn't expected. Also nice to see chapters on SVG and RSS (including a little coverage of RDF and Atom)…<smirk>

Wrox::Beginning XML, 3rd Edition

PS. Beg XML hasn't showed up at Amazon yet, but it seems there's already a pre-order placeholder there for Beginning RSS and Atom Programming but I could see no mention of that at Wrox/Wiley. Heh, amazon.com says publication on Feb 14, 2005, amazon.co.uk says March 11, 2005. Depends on various factors, I s'pose…

[Danny]