This is a nice brief introductory overview of xml in general and its implementations in biological research. The thing I liked about it was it was not too intensive on any topic, and it provided a lot of useful resources both online and literature-wise for me to look up for more information.



It definitely sparked my interest in certain areas of xml and how I may apply it towards my research. One of the things that I really liked was that the author always spelled out all the mentioned acronyms (thank you, finally someone exists out there that does this!). In addition, I also appreciated that the author did not get too bogged down in anyone topic resulting in a bible-like introductory work - thank you again for that. As a result of this I was literally able to read it in few days and determine the usefulness of this technology called `xml`; and without having to read 1k pages to determine this. In this case 'Less is sometimes definitely more'.



My favorite chapter was the one covering Web Services and now understand the basic concepts behind XML-RPC, REST, and SOAP.

The only reason I give it 4 stars is a.)its pricey for a grad student and b.)I use Perl, and he has a two or so chapters using Java to parse xml. So those chapters were not useful to me. But hey you can't please everyone :)



Overall, it helped me recognize just what xml is, how it may be used, who uses it (esp. in biology) - and how they use it, and a list of references for more info. Definitely a good little book to check out for basic conceptual understanding. I want to say its almost a survey, but its actually a little more than that.