Beginning VB.NET XML: Essential XML Skills for VB.NET Programmers [Paperback]

Steven Livingstone (Author), Stewart Fraser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2002

Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been perhaps the biggest buzzword in application development for several years and now Microsoft has taken XML into the core of its .NET Framework. This book is aimed at teaching XML (and related technologies such as XPath, XSLT, and XML Schema) to beginning and intermediate Visual Basic .NET developers who want to understand what all the fuss is about.

Over the course of the book readers will develop a good appreciation of not only what XML is, and how to handle it in Visual Basic .NET, but also how to use XML to build applications to run on a single desktop, single web server or distributed, multi-platform web services, in ways that have been extremely difficult to achieve with previous technologies.

To reinforce the core concepts, the book makes use of numerous individual examples along with two case studies. Firstly, there is an examination of how different XML based approaches can be used in the development of a contact application. The complexity of the project develops as the reader's knowledge increases through the book. Secondly, we dedicate a full chapter to describing the use of XML and a SQL Server database in the implementation of a web-based news portal.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Beginning VB.NET XML: Essential XML Skills for VB.NET Programmers is aimed at the beginning and intermediate VB.NET developer looking to add an appreciation to their core language skills. The book assumes a working knowledge of VB.NET and uses a tutorial approach to build an awareness of what you can accomplish with skilled use of XML.

Product Details

• Paperback: 770 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press (November 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861007787
• ISBN-13: 978-1861007780
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,563,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Introduction to These Great Technologies, December 13, 2002

By 

Mike (Scotland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beginning VB.NET XML: Essential XML Skills for VB.NET Programmers (Paperback)

I am very impressed with this book. It starts off by introducing XML in the first couple of chapters then spends three chapters of teaching the reader how to integrate .NET and XML. This gives a great grounding, allowing the reader to start to developing integrated solutions (such as the book's phone book app case study) after one hundred pages and to produce a fairly comprehensive site in just a couple of hundred pages.

Although they are briefly mentioned in the initial chapters additional elements such as the DOM, XPath, XSLT, Schemas, ADO.NET and web services are given their own chapters later on. The book finishes by consolidating what the reader has learnt with a comprehensive case study. This segregation was very clear and appealed to me by allowing me to pick and choose from the technologies I was interested in (for instance as I often develop for Flash with XML I could skip over the two XSLT chapters because I use Flash to apply formatting).

I am thoroughly impressed with this book because of its clear delivery. I am a real fan of .NET anyway and the authors have managed to put across in a very clear way just how simple it can be to develop with these two technologies. And just to cap it all, as if I am not taken enough with this book it even regularly refers to Edinburgh, my home town, in its examples!

I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who is taking their first steps in using XML with VB.NET and wants to take their skills to the intermediate level.

Mike Poole

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Could have been a great book, July 1, 2003

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Beginning VB.NET XML: Essential XML Skills for VB.NET Programmers (Paperback)

I am only on chapter 3 and have actually enjoyed the subject up to this point but I don't believe I have ever read a techbook with so many gross mistakes. For example, page 76 states "ANSI does use a BOM" when in fact it should have said "ANSI does not use a BOM" which is easily concluded from prior text. Also, the very first code example in ADO is horribly written. One gets the impression after awhile that this is the rough first draft of the actual intended book. Wrox doesn't even list this book as one of their products on their website and I have yet to find the public errata website for this book.
My criticism notwithstanding, the book could have been a great book had someone taken the time to clean it up. I get the impression someone pushed these poor guys into getting this thing "on the street" way before its time.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor content structure, very poor code samples, June 17, 2003

By 

Sean Tucker (Plantation, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beginning VB.NET XML: Essential XML Skills for VB.NET Programmers (Paperback)

The point for a beginner's book is to layout concepts clearly and to make their application evident through clear and COMPLETE examples. The examples in this book are fragmented and there is no proper reference to portions of code that are key to program segments working. I have been programming for 10 years and I cannot follow the struture and examples clearly. Bottom line, there is poor content structure, very poor code samples and poor explaination of concepts, especially for a beginner's book but even for an expert programmer.

I am taking this one back to borders. It should never have left the press in the first place.