So far, everything I need is in this book. I wrote to the author with a question on a printing problem I was having, and she answered really quickly, and helped me out. Even though my problem really didn't have anything to do with Office! This book is easy to read, but doesn't baby you too much. There is a ton of information in this book and its really organzied and explained well. I recommend this book to any new or intermediate user of Office, even if you alreayd think you know it.

I bought this book because I really liked the Excel Troubleshooting book by the same author. I figured if she could write about Excel and explain both simple and complex concepts with equal effectiveness, she'd probably do a good job with the rest of Office. I was right, and I encourage you to buy this book. The examples are practical and realistic, and the coverage is thorough without being dull, and the author's being a teacher really shows because she really can explain things clearly and seems to have a lot of experience with people using and learning Office. I recommend this book without any reservation.

I've been using Office for a while now, and they upgraded me to XP at work, even though I was happy with 97 (they skipped the 2000 upgrade). There were enough new features in XP and there are a zillion things that even an experienced user can miss about Office, so I decided to get a book. This book really makes it easy to learn them. I found quicker ways to do stuff that I'd been doing the way I taught myself to do them, and found a bunch of new features I didn't even know existed. This isn't one of those NYC phone book-thick books, but it does cover all the parts of the Office suite. The writer is easy to read, gives really clear examples and practical suggestions, and obviously really knows the software and how to explain it all to people. I really recommend this book!!!

"PHP XML" does a great job of covering a little bit of everything you can accomplish using PHP and XML. There's so much to cover, though, that a thorough, in-depth discussion of each is impossible in the scope of one book. Rather, the book teaches a programmer enough about the various technologies that they are much better prepared to make initial design decisions in their projects, and have enough example code to get their feet wet with the code to implement those decisions.

I'd recommend the book to anyone who'd like a convenient all-in-one-place reference to XML-related technologies and how PHP interacts with them. The book enables a developer to not just pick a tool because it's available, but to make intelligent decisions about which tool is best for their purposes.

It also gives one enough of a head start that understanding much deeper and more technical information on the web or in other books (XSLT Programmers Reference 2nd Edition, Pro PHP4, etc...) becomes easier to digest.

This book offers an incredible guide and reference to everything you can do with XML and PHP. Not only does this book cover the fundamentals of XML, such as SAX, DOM, XPATH and XSLT, but it covers rich topics like Apache Xindice, advanced XML storage techniques, XML-RPC, SOAP and a variety of both functional and object-oriented approaches to all these concepts.

At IBM, we have always been a strong advocator of PHP for being the perfect language for connecting to databases over the web and offering dynamic content and services. It's simple, elegant, easy and effective. Even further, IBM has always explored XML within PHP and has advocated the use of PHP with our DB2 product.

This book takes your existing PHP skills in HTML and databases and brings them to a whole new level. By taking your current knowledge and adding XML into the mix, this book will truely help you think creatively and create more complex applications. Even given all the hype around "Web Services", this book takes an incredible look into XML-RPC and SOAP. The authors have done, in my opinion, a fantastic job.

I give this book 5 stars because it truely deserves such a rating. The book is absolutely solid. If you want to learn anything from the fundamentals of XML all the way to Web Services, this book will show you the path and everything in-between.

The book features the most solid documentation on core XML technologies that i have ever read:
The SAX chapter is very interesting read because it goes beyond the installation of the SAX libraries and learning how to use the functions. Covering Expat, the chapter explains a great deal about how to use the less uncommon functions like xml_set_notation_decl_handler(), xml_set_external_entity_ref_handler() and the others effectively. Also of note, the diagrams and code examples were very clear and well done in this chapter. The chapter also looks at writing a properly modeled object-oriented SAX parser using eXtremePHP and covers common problems like removing whitespace, handling erroneous XML input and extending the white box infrastructure within eXtremePHP to create very powerful, yet elegant, XML Parsers.The DOM chapter covers the latest DOM extensions introduced in PHP 4.2.1 and even provides code examples and heads up information on what is to come in PHP 4.3.0. The chapter introduces what DOM is and even shows the reader a beautiful diagram illustrating how all the functions relate to an example. By simply looking at this, you can get a feel for how to use DOM almost immediately. The chapter continues to discuss how to enable DOM within your PHP installation on both Windows and UNIX and looks at the real-world advantages and disadvantages to using DOM over SAX. Next, the chapter explains the new DOM object model and looks at the underlying architecture before diving into any code examples. This information sets up the rest of the chapter, making it a lot easier for non-object oriented programs to visualize what methods belong to what objects and understanding the data relationships of the DOM tree. The chapter then presents a lot of code examples. First, it illustrates how many of the methods and functions of the DOM library work and then covers more complicated examples, illustrating how to parse, create and modify DOM documents with and without using HTML forms. The chapter closes with a pretty comprehensive look into the limitations of the DOM standard, explaining to the reader what the boundaries are, common problems with the API yet unfixed and provides future directions the library might take to correct many of the architectural, standards-based and object-oriented capabilities within the library.

Kudos to everyone that made this book happen.

While I know what Web Services are and how they could help me, the code examples in the book are really bad. For one, it feels that some of the code was written by one person and explained by another. Also, the lack of continuity in code style decreases after each chapter (obviously from all the different people that wrote this thing). Some of the introduction chapters were well written, only because they didn't talk about code so much. This book's major failure was the lack of case studies. So Wrox.. with no case studies or quality examples, why should we buy your cheap book?

I think it's a nice book, good job! It introduces wide range about the relationship between PHP and the web services, it's a good base to start. However I have to tell, that there are some bugs (or the descriptions are not clear, don't know) in the example sources, for example I've found one in the chapter about security (Chapter 6).

This is a problem, but with it, I still could recommend this book for everybody not familiar with Web Services, and would like to learn all the related technologies. As it is true at other books, too: you can learn all these things from the web, but you can just find these together in this (or other) book, and you can read it conveniently at your bed with your girlfriend. :)

The content in this book simply rawks - all the latest information on how you can do web services using PHP.There is a wealth on information on how you can use PHP and SOAP (using popular libraries such as NuSOAP, PEAR::SOAP and ezSOAP), PHP and SOAP's front-runner (XML-RPC), how you can discover web services using UDDI. Infact, there is a quality library for PHP::UDDI, that was created for the book, and which the authors have very kindly hosted on sourceforge (phpuddi.sourceforge.net/).

This is *the* book on the subject. Check it out today.