1: Really, and I mean really really really, bad.
I tend not to buy too many technical books because they are usually written by someone who had the time to write them not someone that knows anything. They are usually out of date, and quite often only tell you what you can find in man pages anyway. Still you sometimes pick up a few tips that you might save you a little time.
I was somewhat surprised then to find, as I read through the myriad editing errors and appalling grammar in this 'book' that there wasn't actually ANY useful content at all. In fact if you don't know anything about databases or XML before you read this book, then you will take away some very strange ideas about data such as what is/should be repeating groups, why you use attributes and so. These will probably harm you rather than help.
Even the editing sucks in this book. Obviously someone (well you know who they are because they all get introduced as stars at the front) went through the book and looked for things that might not be obvious, inserting a few explanations. It is a pity they didn't know anything about the subject as they might have been able to put some information in the book. Instead we now find that apparently 'IDE' stands for Integrated Design Electronics - seriously, it is even indexed that way, pointing to page 74. Nice proof reading by the author.
So there I am, getting more and more annoyed with what I thought was just background noise to introduce the subject, turn the page, and... that's it. End of book. Suddenly trips off into a few crummy examples of calling a few methods in a few languages (including Perl for the love of Zarquon) then less than half way through you are at Appendix A, a (weak) introduction to XML and Xpath for a few pages, followed by a huge listing of all the API calls, which are freely available on the web anyway, from whence they were cut and pasted 2 or 3 years ago.
So, this book isn't really about Berkeley DB XML at all - in fact I am not sure what it is about, it is just a random collection of words with some arrant nonsense thrown in to see if you are listening.
Don't buy this, just buy "The Berkeley DB Book" by the same publisher, if you even need that; at least that book has a few decent bits of information in it. Where do I find the negative stars rating? I think the other reviews are by friends and the publisher - they didn't read the same 'book' that I did. Give me my money back! :-(
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