Title: Professional PHP4 XML

Luis Argerich
Chris Lea
Ken Egervari
Matt Anton
Chris Hubbard

James Fuller
Charlie Killian

Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.netPHP and XML are technologies that have been around for several years now. However, only recently books specific on both technologies have been released.

Despite the delay, this is a very good sign for PHP because many sites and media source seem to be forgetting that PHP is also a good solution for performing all the different types of manipulation of XML based information.

Professional PHP4 XML is yet another book in the singular style of Wrox press. Many authors participate in the book addressing the most important uses of XML and explaining how such users can be implemented in PHP.

Specifically the issues that are covered are: parsing and generating (SAX, DOM), querying (XPath), transforming (XSLT), RPC and Web services (XML-RPC, SOAP) .

Besides that there is a chapter about some of the existing ready to use PHP components for performing the different types of XML document manipulation and several example and case study chapters that cover specific XML based technologies like: RSS, XML databases, WDDX, Jabber instant messaging protocol, XML-RPC, SOAP, SVG, etc..

The only thing that I miss in this, like in other Wrox Press books is the relation of which authors wrote which chapters and how to contact them in case the reader would like to clear any doubts.

Between Wrox Professional PHP4 XML and New Riders XML and PHP book, it is hard to recommend one or the other because both are very well written and cover pretty much the same topic that matter to anybody developing XML applications with PHP. If you can afford them, it would probably be a good idea to purchase both as there may be details that may be slightly clearer in one book than in the other.