This book gives you a very well-organized and informative tour of what's happening in the XML arena, the problem is this particular area of technology already so wide and so fast-expanding it's very difficult to get into the deep details of all areas, but the authors have done an excellent job of choosing the right technologies of tomorrow and delving into the details of those with sufficient background-story and code examples; in fact I would have given this book 5 stars if it didn't waste the first 40 so pages on explaining the client-server and peer-to-peer architectures and some extremely basic/boring J2EE and other generic topics, which has no place in a techy book like this. I would urge the reader to skip thru Ch. 1 in 4 minutes and dive right into the next ones, which are really very well written.
Beginners may use this book as an invaluable reference, intermediate level developers should only look into area of their interest, even advanced developers might find a few topics of their interest. Some of the topics the authors had to cover in a hurry, I'll say they have done a very good job in taking one specific feature and dissecting it, for example which discussing JSPs, the book lists a working example of JSP tag and explains it well, I'll say overall, the book is very well balanced between providing theoretical and background information on XML technologies and providing actual implementation examples. And yes, they did not miss out on the design patterns which are useful in this context!
http://rapidshare.com/files/51998677/1930110308.zip