|
|
|
XML @ Web Programming
Programming Shed : Programmer Store & Resources |
|
|
|
|
|
XML Index - XML Book :
XML Application Development with MSXML 4.0
by Danny Ayers, Steven Livingstone, Stephen Mohr, Darshan Singh, Michael Corning Paperback - 770 pages 1st edition (January 2002) Wrox Press Inc ISBN: 186100589X Dimensions (in inches): 1.45 x 8.99 x 7.27 Book Description: MSXML (Microsoft XML Core Services) version 4.0 is a free, feature-rich server component for all types of XML processing, including XML, XSLT, and Schemas. It has comprehensive support for W3C and other major specifications, as well as many proprietary enhancements. This makes MSXML 4.0 a useful and robust tool that can be used as the processing engine behind a wide range of XML-based applications. This book is arranged in three parts. The first is a reference to the support for XML standards and proprietary extensions within MSXML. The next section shows how to achieve typical application functionality, using the supported technologies in a practical context. The last section contains several case studies that demonstrate bringing together the individual tasks into complete applications. XML Application Development with MSXML 4.0 covers: • DOM and SAX2 support in MSXML • XPath and XSLT (W3C specifications and earlier implementations) for transformations on the server and client • Schemas (XSD and XDR) for validation on the server and client • Styling XML with CSS, VML, and behaviors in IE • Implementing linking and pointing for web applications • Transmitting, handling, and manipulating data on the server and client • Optimizing system architecture for improved performance • Performance, scalability, and security techniques • Case studies showing MSXML in real world applications From the Publisher: This book is for developers who are already familiar with XML. It will teach you how to make the most of MSXML's comprehensive feature-set to create powerful applications. If you are responsible for developing professional XML-based solutions on a Windows platform, this book is for you. Customer Reviews: Reviewer: Mark Bosley from Mark Bosley MSXML4 is the fastest XML parser in the world and this book helps you take advantage of it. Some of these chapters are a gold mine. Some have obviously been sitting around from a couple years ago. Please Wrox, stop it! I'll pay the same price to have the gold mine chapters alone. Michael Corning's chapter is filled with truly worthwhile stuff about the parser, coming as it does from Redmond. Danny Ayers' chapter on implement a XLink system is really brilliant and well written. Corning and Ayers show that you can be thoughtful and literate when writing about the specifics of a new technology. The chapter on XPath is really incomplete to the point of not being an unusable reference. For the concat function we are given the example of concat("sku","562","B"). Now exactly why would anyone do this? concat is almost always used for placing XML data with literal text. I use concat is creating URLs like this . With the contains function we are not told what happens if the second string is zero length. What does happen? It always returns true, which seems pretty odd to me, which, in turn, makes it something worthwhile to mention. Also, I don't see any mention of one of XPath's weirdest quirks. Namely, if a item in a filter evaluation is a nodelist, then XPath uses an ANY semantics. That is too say //product[@price>$Specials/@price] gives us products that are more expensive than ANY of the specials. The fault here is with the Wrox editors, not the authors. Chapters 9 10 and 11 are also great. A very worthwhile, nay essential book for Microsoft technology. Alas, the book is already slightly out of date as MS has released MSXML4 SP1. You will need to add oXMLResp.setProperty("NewParser", True) to various places in the code. If this is what it takes to use a parser an order of magnitude faster than the competition, so be it. Reviewer: Mr Daniel Bodart from London United Kingdom The book is very readable; I read half the book in one sitting and found that the flow from one topic to the next was very natural. To start with this book covers pretty much all versions of MSXML, including older non standard features such as WD-xsl. Naturally there is more focus on the new standards, but examples and recommendations are given for all. One feature I very much appreciated was a list of versions that shipped various OS / Browser / Major Applications. This book also scores highly as a lot of examples are giving in Jscript, but also includes examples in VB COM and VBScript. |
|
|
|
© 2005-2006, Programming Shed
|
