Customer Reviews

Xml Design and Implementation (Professional)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Let me put my review in perspective. I have been programming in one language or another for twenty years. I was the project manager for a Fortune 500 company's e-commerce initiative. I do some consulting on the side. In other words, I consider myself to be an veteran programmer.

This is not an introductory text. As with most Wrox "Professional" titles, Spencer presumes a certain level of experience on his reader's behalf. I find these titles to be exactly what I desire: not too simple to be trivial, and yet not as dry as a pure reference text.

XML has been a hot topic for over a year now. As a result, more and more people are trying to get a grasp of this technology. Most of the XML books that I have read (and I own a few) provide reasonable explanations of it. I found that understanding the concepts of XML was simple; it was trying to figure out where to use it that was difficult. These beginning books told me the "how," but not the "when."

"Professional XML Design and Implementation" fills this void nicely. The entire book is dedicated to explaining a realistic scenario from end to end. I will note that this book does focus entirely on Microsoft's implementation of XML, but this is a reasonable choice: even at the present time, IE 5.0 or greater is the only released browser that supports XML (I am not including Netscape 6 PR1 through 3 simply because they are still in beta).

Along the way, Spencer provides us with a clear commentary as to why he made certain design decisions. He also attempts to include some instruction. Most of it is still accurate, but the section on XSL is now very outdated.

The application itself is pretty creative. The code behind it is diverse: server side scripting is used to build XML from data stored in a database; client side scripting is used to build XML data within a browser without requiring round trips. One particularly interesting feature was to save the work done on the client side in a cookie so that it could persist between sessions, before finally being submitted to the server.

I believe that most companies who are interested in XML at the time of this review are more interested in B2B (business to business) scenarios than B2C (business to consumer) ones. The limited browser support mentioned above makes this a reasonable assumption. The last chapter of the book entitled "The Transactional System" provdies some good insight into how XML can be used in a B2B environment.

A small drawback is that the book does not contain (and therefore does not review) the entire code listing for this application. Thankfully the files are available on Wrox' Web site.

This is a great book if you already have at least a cursory understanding of XML, and are looking to understand more about its application. If you are still struggling with the "what is XML?" question, then I recommend that you start with a different title than this one, especially when you consider that the XML/XSL standards have evolved considerably since its writing.

I was looking for something that clearly explains and introduces XML and XSL, Paul Spencer has done a good job. The book flows well and is easy to read. While I had little HTML or ASP knowledge which is recommended I was able to follow all the examples and come out with a good understanding. A case study is provided at the end of the book which ties all the concepts together, it requires certain software and hardware components, so I didn't attempt it, but if it's like the rest of the book, it will be clear and methodical.

Small book, but straight to the point & direct content. I like it. I'm very happy that this book is not, once again, explaining XML from scratch (like most XML book including the VB one). This book contains one case-study and it follows it through the end.

This case-study is about a working and normal web site, one about traveling, so this is finally an XML book that actually have real-life examples and not some useless pieces of code that does not tie in to OUR applications.

For XML newcomers, I would strongly suggest taking a look at Beginning XML first and polish your knowledge with this one.

This book explains XML (both theory and practice) by following through an example system. There are plenty of code samples for you to try out and the author explains step-by-step the longer code samples.

Overall an enjoyable read.

This is another book originally from Wrox that I've purchased and can't find the download source for.

With as many books as have slipped through the rather large crack between Wrox and Apress, I'm having a difficult time recommending titles from either to our IT staff or partners.

Chris Fox

Lots of good examples & code that really illustrates what is going on. I got a toy XML page working in no time at all.

This book should appeal to programmers who are comfortable with ASP & web tech in general. Definitely not for beginners.

The appendices are very useful. The entire XML 1.0 specification is there as well as an XSL reference.

One of the other reviewers criticized the dependence on IE5, but then, IE5 is the only browser that supports XML client-side.

If I had a couple of criticisms they would be the layout and the editing. But these are small flaws that do not get in the way of a very solid book.

Hello, I recommend this book!:

1. It contains a good real-world example, all the important steps are described. It's really not only a book on XML and how/where XML fits in but also on Internet-application design. CSS, DHTML, ASP are also covered to some extent.

2. I appreciate him being an 'IT-Consultant writing', instead of a 'writer, writing about IT', the book is pretty much 'pure knowledge', written in a personal, engaging style.

3. I appreciated the sourcecode, which was easily downloaded from Wrox. I got it running under PWS + MSAccess.

Keep up the good work, Paul! Cheers.

This MS-centric book is an easy read with great detail on some of the mysterious aspects of XML that are not covered in other books. XMLHTTP, DTDs, XSL and Schema are all very well explained with supporting examples.

I must recommend that you buy this book instead of, or at least before Alex Homer's WROX book, "XML IE5 Programmer's Reference". This book will help you more easily learn the technology and how to make it work in your architecture.

Okay, so the examples in the book use IE5. Boo hoo. If you're using IIS, just grab a ~400k file from Microsoft (which contains the parser itself) and now the IE5 parser works on the server. Then you can use ASP and do the transformation on the server side and send the client a plain HTML page... no need for XML support. A user at a public terminal in a library (with Lynx installed) will be able to see your page. Gotta love it.

While some people assume Microsoft is the centre of the universe, the rest of us use a multitude of operating systems, technologies, and software vendors. This particular book is focused completely on the MS/IE view of XML (and related technologies) ... and I found that even that was quite basic. It missed the whole design arena of schema development (dtd), including standard schemas, good schema design, etc. Quite a poor buy in my opinion.