XML has been around for many years, so what makes this book different? Well, a lot of the competitors out there are large tomes; this book assumes a different approach, showing that you can give the reader all they need to know to hit the ground running, without making them trawl through hundreds of pages of syntax.

The book also gives the most up-to-date picture of the topic—XML support in the most modern web browsers, creating XML-driven applications using the most versions of web standards and server-side languages, including CSS 2.1/3, DOM, XSLT and XPath 2, PHP 5, ASP.NET 2, and many more.

Finally, the book provides an introduction to Ajax-style programming, which is an essential topic for modern web developers to understand. XML is core to Ajax, so an understanding of it is essential when learning how to program Ajax functionality. This book therefore provides a great stepping stone for readers wishing to take this path.