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XML @ Web Programming
Programming Shed : Programmer Store & Resources |
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XML Index - XML Book :
Professional XML Schemas
by Jon Duckett, Nik Ozu, Kevin Williams, Stephen Mohr, Kurt Cagle, Oliver Griffin, Francis Norton, Ian Stokes-Rees, Jeni Tennison Perfect Paperback - 690 pages 1st edition (July 2001) Wrox Press Inc ISBN: 1861005474 Dimensions (in inches): 1.56 x 9.04 x 7.28 Amazon.com: Suitable for virtually any XML designer or developer, Professional XML Schemas provides a challenging, in-depth guide to state-of-the-art XML Schema tools and techniques. This title will likely be a virtual must-have for anyone working with XML for databases or document management. The range of topics presented here helps make this title a success. While there is some leading-edge (and somewhat obscure) material on emerging topics in XML Schemas, much of the book avoids XML "language lawyering" and concentrates on delivering a solid tour of the basics. The authors walk before they run, taking the reader along with basic XML Schema constructs to define simple data types in XML. They show off elements, attributes, and simple data types. (There's coverage of the full complement of over two dozen built-in XML Schema data types for numerical, string, date, and IDREFs.) The earlier sections include the author's own sample classes for a handful of common data types for such common entities as people's names, countries, IP addresses and URIs, plus geographical locations. Fully internationalized, these samples can serve as a basis for entities in your custom projects. The second half of the book digs into design strategies at a higher level, dealing more with XML Schemas. The authors cover several reusable design strategies for creating workable XML Schemas (like the Russian Doll, the Slice, and finally the Venetian Blind model, which blends the first two). There's discussion of the best ways to express required and optional elements, along with choice values and ordering of required elements. Integration with XML namespaces and a discussion of the issues surrounding reuse in XML Schemas (like combining and extending existing datatypes) show how powerful this standard really is. Valuable chapters on using XML Schemas with databases (including expressing relational integrity and normalization), plus the differences between XML Schemas used for document management will help you make the right design choices in each setting. The book closes with a discussion and tour of late-breaking tools like Schematron (and its competitors) as well as the possibilities for functional programming with XML Schema in schema-based programming (SBP). Whether you are an XML novice or expert, this text will extend the range of what you can accomplish with XML Schemas, from creating more reusable datatypes to reusing existing schemas. While XML Schemas will perhaps never be as simple as using DTDs, this book succeeds at putting this new standard into reach for any working developer or designer. --Richard Dragan Book Description: In order to leverage XML's power as a self-describing and extensible language, we need a way to define and describe the allowable content of any type of XML document. In the past, this has been achieved with DTDs, but these have in many ways fallen short of the requirements for working with data. XML Schemas were created to provide a more powerful and flexible mechanism for describing permissible document structures using XML syntax. They provide a set of built-in datatypes, which can mimic the... Customer Reviews: Reviewer: A reader from Michigan, United States At first glance this book impressed me by its sheer volume and the fact that there seemed to be some interesting topics discussed that went beyond the schema spec itself. However, as I looked at it more closely, I have two big problems with it: 1. There _are_ a lot of errors, and they're not just harmless typos. I found numerous examples that are incorrect, and not just because they are missing a quote or something. It makes me wonder if anyone bothered to validated the examples with a parser. 2. It was very obvious that the book was written by multiple authors, with little coordination between them. There is a lot of overlapping and even contradictory information in the book, which is frustrating. It is also not organized well - I had a hard time finding the simplest of concepts - for example, what attributes are allowed on the "element" element if it is a ref vs. a name, whether it's global vs. local, etc. Overall, I was not impressed Reviewer: A reader from Cedar Rapids, IA USA I had to create an XML schema out of an XML file that was already existing (I am sure that rarely happens:-)) and I could get the job done by reading half of this book. Would be a five star if not for the typos. This is a much better way of learning to write XML schemas compared to formal language at the XML schema specification site. Reviewer: A reader from Alexandria, VA USA This book is worth the price for its discussion of modeling documents vs modeling data. Coming from the document world, I have found relational database types have a hard time understanding the "model" of a document schema. This book explains the document analysis process concisely, but clearly. If you work in a place that is trying to bring the document and database worlds closer together, this book is helpful. Reviewer: lizzybarham from Austin, TX United States This is a nice XML Schemas book. It goes through the material thorougly with examples. It also brings up case-scenerios that help one think about tackling the projects we are likely to encounter (or in my case currently encountering) in our XML doings. Although there are some typos they do not glare the fine material in this book nor hinder learning. |
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