Microsoft has done a partially wonderful thing with the Office 2003 suite of tools: it has opened up the document formats used by some of these tools-- Word, Excel, Access, and InfoPath, but not Outlook and PowerPoint-- now allowing content to be saved as XML. XML opens up content that was previously locked in proprietary file formats, allowing better interoperation between the Office tools, and also 3rd party tools.

The mascot on the cover of this book is the Malay palm civet, a mammal that has the face of a racoon and the smell of a skunk. I wonder if the authors can pick which animals get on their cover. I mean, do they get choices? I can see the editor telling them, "You can have the shrimp, the skunk, or the palm civet...what's it going to be?" Palm civets apparently have dirty feet--they left paw prints all over the pages, next to blocks of text with sometimes useful, sometimes superfulous information. Trap icons and text blocks were also sprinkled throughout to warn the reader of potential, well, traps. These were useful, but it would be nice to be able to find them all easily, maybe having a 'Traps' subject in the index would help?

My approach in reviewing this book was two-pronged: first, I tested it against the Half-Baked Tech Book Basics; second, I used the book in an attempt to solve a real problem involving content from Word, Excel, and Access.

First, let's cover the basics:

• Book cover...check, already covered.
  
• Theory isolated in early chapters or appendices...check
  
• Index is complete and easy to find...check.
  
  • The edges of the index pages are black, so it's easy to find the index without excessive thumbing. The index is Not exactly symmetric: 'Documents, Word - annotations', but not 'Word, annotations' (there was a WordprocessingML, annotations entry though).
  
  
• Table of contents is like a summary index...check.
  
  • Organized with clear descriptions of contents within.
  
  
• K&R-like examples, laser sharp with minimal information needed to convey the point of the example...hmm.
  
  • This is a difficult call because XML itself is pretty verbose, and Office XML is flattened so many of even very simple examples take a page or two. Some of the listings could have been broken up more, with comments closer to the relevant XML, or perhaps line-numbered so text could refer to specific areas of code. The authors did use bold-face type effectively at times to identify key parts of the XML they were discussing.
  
  
• Keep obvious stuff to a minimum...hmm.
  
  • Again, with books on Windows applications, you should expect some figures that show a drop-down menu's options, but really, this doesn't do much for the reader and it takes a lot of page real estate. Maybe my biggest beef with the book?
  
  
• Written in clear simple langauge...check.
  
• Some humor (XML is dry stuff)...not so much. However, palm civets are fairly funny looking.