You don't have to be a professional developer to use the Office XML features. We've written this book so that office users who are comfortable with preference settings and macros will be able to tap into these resources. If you can deal with scripts or are willing to copy and modify ours you'll be able to do even more. And if you are a pro, you'll find that we don't talk down to you: you'll easily see the added possibilities for real program code.
And XML knowledge isn't a prerequisite for this book either. It includes a bonus section of tutorials on XML and its related technologies, adapted from the best-selling XML Handbook.