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XML @ Web Programming
Programming Shed : Programmer Store & Resources |
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XML Index - XML Book :
XML By Example
by Benoit Marchal Paperback - 512 pages 2nd edition (September 7, 2001) Que ISBN: 0789725045 Dimensions (in inches): 1.18 x 9.16 x 7.38 Amazon.com: XML books are a dime a dozen, but many are quite tedious in the way they methodically step through all of the various standards. Que's Example series helps you learn by doing with countless examples that build your knowledge through hands-on experience. XML by Example covers an impressive amount of material in relatively little space, providing critical XML knowledge using a reader-friendly format. This second edition has been updated to cover the latest and greatest features of the ever-evolving XML standard. It includes coverage of the final XML Schemas recommendation and the latest developments of XSL. The book is quite suitable for anyone with basic HTML knowledge. The book steps its way through all the key topics--namespaces, models, transformations, formatting, etc.--with a style that keeps you engaged in what each topic looks like in real code, versus in theory. Plenty of notes and cautions highlight important points and pitfalls. There is an excellent presentation of how XML can be used to render formatted HTML using Cascading Style Sheets and XSL--one of the first areas many developers want to tackle when wading into the XML universe. Advanced topics such as SOAP and three-tier architectures are presented, albeit only at a level of detail sufficient to familiarize you with the concepts. XML by Example is an excellent place to start to learn XML and a strong preparatory text for more extensive reading on the subject. --Stephen W. Plain Book Description: XML by Example teaches Web developers to make the most of XML with short, self-contained examples every step of the way. The book presumes knowledge of HTML, the Web, Web scripting, and covers such topics as: Document Type Definitions, Namespaces, Parser Debugging, XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), and DOM and SAX APIs. At the end, developers will review the concepts taught in the book by building a full, real-world e-commerce application. Customer Reviews: Reviewer: Michael J. Waluk from Natick, MA The best XML book out there! It thoroughly explains XML and its uses, but any XML book can do that. What makes this book special is its chapters on XML's companion standards, which actually make it useful. The book begins with XML syntax, DTDs and Namespaces. It then moves on to the fun stuff: XSL, CSS, using the DOM and the SAX API in parsers. With that foundation, it walks you through creating XML documents inside applications. The book wraps up with a detailed N-Tiered Architecture example, which was thankfully written in Java. The author was kind enough to include a crash course on Java in the Appendix. Overall, the examples were excellent and interesting. I have read four other XML books, including one with the same title, and this is the first where I could actually apply the examples in my real world projects. My office has a copy of most of the XML books out there, but this is the only one I'd recommend to developers at any level. Reviewer: A reader from San Francisco, CA Yes, there are a lot of good things about this book. It has one of the largest coverage of XML techiques. The author has organized the chapters of this book in a step by step fashion, some building on knowledge of previous chapters as well as an appropriate gradual increase of difficulty from chapter to chapter, of which I commend the author for. The book showed promise in every respect. However, there are two major fallacies which kept this book from being the best. First, we know that the author wanted to empasize learning by example through the title. If that is the case, than those examples better be concise and crystal clear. But quite the contrary is true. For one thing, some code examples are just way too long and loses the audience right away. I remember spending ten minutes looking through some of the later examples to see what point the author was trying to make. That should not be the case. Critical areas of the code should at least be highlighted if you're going to make code samples that long. For example, when the author was going through the concept of namespaces, not only were there a lot of unessary code in the already long winded samples, the explanations don't even relate to the code samples. I got totally lost. I finally got the concept by referring to another book, "ASP XML" from wrox which not only was it not a beginner's book, but its not entirely focused on XML either. Now that is pathetic. Second, this is not a book for someone with zero knowledge of XML. With such a broad range of information, it is critical for the author to put things in perspective right in the beginning. Being a newbie to XML, and the magnatidude of concepts that the author introduced, how the hell am I supposed to know that there is validating in addition to parsing. That's why the chapter in DTD totally threw me off because I was expecting a parsing syntax after an explanation of XML data. The author could have easily spent the first two pages telling us roughly what the general concepts are, and how DTD, Schemas, XSL, SAX, DOM etc. fit into the whole picture rather than finding that out 6 chapters later and totally wasting my time going back and forth as well as to other books. Going through this book is like walking through a museum without a guide, yeah, you will eventually get it if you spend 10X the time reading the small print below each exhibit. I would have given this book 4 stars if the author did not mention that this book is suitible for XML newbies, but it definitely serves better as a reference manual for developers with some XML experience who wants to explore new techiques to better serve their purpose. Like I said in the beginning, this book showed promise in its organization and progression. Only if the code samples were more concise and the explanations more relevant and in depth, this could have easily been my bible for XML Reviewer: Joe Turner from Spring, Texas United States I wanted to harness XML to automate some of the tedious aspects of producing content for my website, HTML help projects, and inside my commercial software products. I have successfully used DocBook/SGMLtools to produce documents of various types, but I wanted the additional flexibility that XML promises. After all, isn't XML an extension of SGML? With that simplistic goal in mind (generating boilerplate XML and doing simple transformations), I started scouring the Net in search of a good primer. I ended up with this book to learn the basics. This book is consciously aimed at readers who have experience and knowledge with HTML, and a passing familiarity with XML. It bills itself as an example hands-on driven informational tutorial. Unfortunately, it falls short, and in my opinion is a little myopic. The first five chapters of this book lay a good foundation for understanding XML. Unfortunately, it isn't until chapter five, that you are actually (almost indirectly) walked through the process of REALLY using XML. Finding an XSL processor was tedious, requiring several Net searches. This book effectively presents the basics, and keeps going (far beyond what I wanted to know). It even steps you though building a simple e-commerce solution (with Java and XML). Compared to the other XML resources I looked at, this one is the best at providing a good introduction. After reading this book you won't be a guru, but you should have a concrete understanding of the basics. Reviewer: steve from Berkeley CA, USA I am very pleased to have a copy of XML By Example at my desk. Every time that I have had the need to learn about a new XML related topic I have been able to pick up this book, turn to the related chapter, read a lucid explanation, and then look at an example which truly illustrates the content. This has proven to be a very effective manner for me to learn about XML. The author has done a great job of treating the material with the right balance between abstraction and example. I would highly recommend it to anyone who needs to learn XML/XSL/DOM/SAX concepts. |
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