Customer Reviews

XML Bible, Gold Edition (With CD-ROM)

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This book is terrific, and if you want to learn about using XML in web sites I recommend that you buy it.

XML books are, on the whole, pretty lousy. Everyone keeps talking about how XML will transform the web, but most books are thin on specifics -- exactly how XML will be used, and exactly how to make things happen. I've seen other reviews here from people who feel that this book doesn't do a good enough job of explaining those things. But I think that compared to its competition, it does an excellent job.

XML is new, and it's not in widespread use. As I write this, the only popular browser with solid XML support is IE5, and I guess that most people don't want to write sites that only work with one browser. But if you go to the XML site at msdn.microsoft.com and look at the table of contents, you'll get an idea of what XML can do, and why you'll want to learn it.

The book is well written and its a pleasure to spend time with it. The author knows as much about writing as he does about computers, and he knows a lot about computers. The explanations of XML are clear and conversational in tone. The focus is on using XML in web sites, and the book gives a lot of needed attention to XSL, the style sheet language used to format XML docments for the web. I've read other XML books, and I bought this one primarily to learn more about XSL.

The title of the book might be somewhat misleading. It is not a comprehensive guide to XML, but rather a best of breed tutorial on a very important chunk of XML stuff you'll want to learn. One reviewer pointed out that it's a poor reference book, and that's true, in a sense. There is an XML reference in an appendix, but it's an ultra-geeky BNF reference that probably won't be very helpful to most readers, especially given the book's non-programmer target audience.

A more serious problem is the book's neglect of Microsoft's XML schema technology, which is far superior, in my view, to DTDs. The word "schema" doesn't even appear in the index. And finally, this is not the book you want to buy if you want to learn how to program a java XML parsing engine. This is not a book about programming.

So why do I give this book five stars? It's fun to read and it's great at explaining XML itself, as well as a number of vital, connected technologies: XSL, DTDs, CSS, CSL, XLinks, and XPointers. I was fuzzy on XSL, XLinks, and XPointers, and this book helped me a lot. Those are exactly the things you need to know to get a XML site up and running on the web.

XML is a big, important technology, and I don't think there's a single book that covers everything you'll want to know. This book, despite the "Bible" title, doesn't try to cover everything. But what it does cover, it covers very well.

This book gives one of the better introductions to XML I've seen. Rather than limiting the scope to a simple overview of the concepts, Elliote Rusty Harold incorporates useful examples that allow the reader to begin experimenting with XML right away. The book is not going to get a beginner coding e-commerce solutions using XML. For that kind of work further reading is definately required. But this book does cover all the neccessary concepts to get started and does a better job than most explaining XSL - the key to actually using your XML documents. I'd highly reccommend this title as a starter to anyone's XML collection.

I'm going to start out by saying I'm glad I bought this book. It's a good introduction to XML. The early chapters on XML and DTDs are very good. They got me up to speed quickly so I could explain to my managers why our company should pursue XML and what the benefits will be.

The chapters on CSS-1 and CSS-2 were excellent and very useful even for writing regular HTML. Overall, the first 13 chapters were just what I needed.

Coverage of XSL was weaker and, in many respects, inadequate. The book never really discusses XPaths in enough detail. I thought the chapter on namespaces was too late in the book. The book is fleshed out with exceptionally long examples that added little value past the first few lines.

The chapter on reading a DTD (chapter 20) was a good idea, poorly executed. The complexity of the DTD selected by the author was totally inappropriate for the level of this book, even if the DTD was extremely well written.

The author never covers schema construction, and only briefly mentions them at all. Given their superiority over DTDs, this was a glaring error.

I was also disappointed by the lack of instruction on how to move XML across the Internet between applications. XML that never leaves the system it was constructed on is of little value.

Many of these problems are caused by the age of the book. It's over a year old now which, in XML terms, makes it yesterdays news. Now that this book has got me excited about XML, I'm off to find some more.

This is one of the best books on XML, infact THE best, that I have seen so far. Though this book does not cover programming with XML, it does a great job at explaining XML documents, DTDs, CSS and XSL. I am not the kind of guy who can read a technical book from cover to cover, but this book was a cool exception. ERH is a great author and reading through his book was like reading through a novel. There were lots of examples and they were very illustrative. After reading this book, you may not become an expert in using XML parsers with Java or Perl, but you definitely can write your own XML documents, DTDs, Cascading style sheets and XSL. If you are new to XML, this could be a very good first book to read. If you are a baseball fan, you will enjoy the book more because ERH goes about developing an XML document for baseball leagues throughout the course of the book. The examples start out easy and gradually blow up in size. Each concept is clearly explained before it is used and there were very less forward references anywhere. I hope ERH writes another book for Java/XML programmers. He is one author who consistently delivers great stuff.

Great examples and references. The CDROM is packed with utilities, browsers and source code. An easy writing style makes this book easy to read and technically acurate. Real world examples actually let you start writing style sheets and documents in the first few chapters. I'll post another feedback when I finish the book. So far I am very pleased.

I've got a few recent computer books under my belt and this one is my least favorite so far. Maybe my expectations were too high after going through The JavaScript Bible. Maybe XML is too young. But I really expected a mix of tutorial and reference. This book has very little that could be used a refernce, as in (look up term, read about its specifics). I found it to be filled with long multi-page code listings that are duplicated on the CD and felt like they were just trying to figure out how to make the book thick. They cover Cascading style sheets. Well, thats ok, but I wanted to learn XML. I was surprised that I didn't find a good discussion on techniques, methods, or tools to convert XML to HTML, which will definately be required for a few years. I am going to have to find another XML book or some good online resources, and if I didn't get this book at 50% off, I would probably return it. Ok, I did get a little out of it, I got the intro, the overview, of XML that I needed. But I really can't see that this book will be opened on my desk while I am developing.

I found this to be well written, concise and extremely informative. I have some experience writing web pages in HTML but am not an expert webmaster my any means. I found that he presented the ideas in good detail, and usually referenced well known web resources (W3.org, etc.) as places to get further detail on specific concepts. Mr. Harold didn't waste words or space on irrelevant fluff as so many technical writers are wont to do. If I have one issue with this book, it would be that Mr Harold uses too many baseball references in his examples - most of that data was completely lost on me, a baseball (un)fan.

All in all, I found this book to be well worth the investment. It will have a place on my reference bookshelf for a long time to come.

Many beginners will be put off by the sheer size (1200 pages!) of this book. Big mistake. There aren't a lot of books that cover all the basics of XML technology, focus on the real needs of XML newbies, and do so in clear, readable prose. In fact, this may be the only one.

The problem with XML is that you can use it for a lot of different things. (Hence those 1200 pages.) So people who write about it tend to be specialists in some specific area, like building XML web applications, or designing XML document schemas, etc. Or else they're markup standards wonks, good at picking out the tiny nits that make the whole concept work, but terrible at explaining what XML is *for*.

Harold, by contrast, knows his readers, and knows what they need. He makes very few assumptions about what you already know. If you know how to use a text editor (but see below for a warning) and a web browser, you're ready to go. The author leads you step by step through all the basic concepts. There are a *lot* of steps, of course. But only the first 200 pages are absolutely essential for every reader. Not everybody needs to know about Document Type Definitions, Wireless Markup Language, or Scalable Vector Graphics. Not that there's any flab here -- all the different XML applications Harold describes are widely used, and it makes sense to include a good basic intro to all of them.

Harold also avoids a mistake I myself probably would have made -- he carefully avoids dealing XML's historical baggage. XML is a limited version of SGML -- a technology that wasted decades floundering in its own complexity. For once history really is bunk.

I do have some issues, more with the publisher than with the author. The big one is the sample text files on the CD -- all with Macintosh line endings! Judging from the screenshots, the author works mainly with Windows, so we can't blame him. If you're not a Mac person, you need a text editor that can handle these files, or a program for converting them. Notepad doesn't work, Wordpad does -- but complains a lot about "discarding formatting." If you're a vim user, add "mac" to the fileformats option.

Actually, it's pretty silly to even bother with a CD for this kind of material. Attention publishers! Book buyers are not impressed by "bonus cd-roms" that contain freely available software and text files that would be easier to download from the web. Nor are they impressed by silly markteroid terms like "Bible". Who are you, Charleton Heston?

I first encountered Elliotte Rusty Harold when I read Java I/O, from O'Reilly. I really liked his writing and decided that he would go on my list of authors to look for (usually, I buy straight O'Reilly titles). I needed a book on XML to do some work for school and decided this would be the one to try. An excellent decision!! This book really helped, giving all the info I needed (at least as far as XML goes, it changes every few seconds). I highly recommend this book to others needing in depth coverage of the current state of XML.

This book focussed on the technical aspects of XML: writing well-formed and valid XML documents, preparing DTDs to constrain document content and layout and transforming these XML documents into other XML as well as HTML documents. The author also highlighted the much wider scope of X-Links and X-Pointers compared with the customary HTML links. I was unable to use my tried-and-true tactic of learning by working through the examples since - as the author kept emphasizing - most of the technology is not yet supported by the major browsers. Moreover, I was expecting to learn more on how XML could help me to deliver dynamic content to web sites; particularly how I could use it to draw data from various database and non-database sources. I had to rely on a couple of the articles from Microsoft's MSDN Library to fill in the pieces. In fact, the MSDN Library enlightened me about schemas - and the great advantages they provide compared with DTDs, the XML DOM and the provision for building XML islands within HTML documents. Of course, I was able to understand all the MSDN stuff as a result of the solid groundwork laid by the XML Bible. I am now looking forward to reading the 'XML IE5 Programmer's Reference' and some other XML applications book to round out my understanding of what seems to be a very exciting and promising technology!