A great tutorial about SimpleXML by the guy who created it. If the man who creates something can easily explain it so that everyone understands, he has truly written something useful.

Those of you who have parsed XML with PHP4, or are currently dealing with XML parsing in PHP4, know that it can indeed be very painful to handle documents with any degree of complexity. You either need to use the SAX approach and write a handwritten parser for every document, or you need to use the DOM extension; which (in addition to its tendency to crash, leak and generally misbehave under heavy usage) involves the pain of processing documents using an API designed for a heavily object oriented language and targeted at supporting every single one of XML’s idiosyncrasies.

SimpleXML makes it all easier.