Customer Reviews

Essential XML: Beyond MarkUp

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

If you enjoy cuddling up with sentences such as:

"Element information items are fairly adaptable to representing arbitrary data structures, as one simply needs to build an isomorphism between the "native" data structure and a tree-oriented graph of elements and character data"

... then you'll enjoy this book immensely. Me - I'm too stupid and life's too short.

When I first heard of this book I was quite excited to get my hands on it. Don Box has authored or co-authored two of the best COM books out there (Essential COM and Effective COM). Aaron Skonnard writes excellent articles about XML for MSDN Magazine. How could this book fail to please? Well it does and it does so on several levels.

This is a 370 page book. 100 pages are devoted to various appendices. This would be fine if the appendices were useful, instead you get 50 pages devoted to a print-out of the XML Infoset Working Draft from the W3C, which in the author's own words "is hopelessly out of date". The text itself is very much in a philosophical vein and provides very few insights into XML and its uses.

There are also many, many errors throughout the text. Errors are of course understandable, but there is such a profusion of errors in some sections so as to make them almost unreadable (especially Chapter 3). The authors claim in the intro that a web site has been created to support this book. Well if you venture to this site you find a page with the single sentence "Thanks for buying the book!". How extremely helpful!

Save your money and instead buy one of the Wrox books on XML.

The title of this book is very misleading. If someone wants to read what essential XML is - the essence of XML -, all they have to do is read the W3C recomendations a couple of times. These are freely available on the web. But a book entitled "Essential XML", if it is to be true its title, should elaborate on the W3C reccomendations only to the extent that these elaborations will be useful and meaningful to everbody. And this book is far from that.

This book is best suited for academics, writers, a small subset of application developers and/or people who have lots of time on their hands and are at loss as to what to read next. If the author was being honest, he would have called this book "The XML Infoset" and left it that. Those who are interested in this sub-topic would have then bought the book. But then, the author would not have been repayed as handsomely as he is presumably being payed now.

I fear that Mr. Box is cashing in on the "Guru" status he as (rightly) acquired with his COM/DCOM/MTS books and articles. His first COM book, "Essential COM" was more aptly titled than this one, in that it did describe the bare bones of COM. However, it shared some of the shortfallings as this book in that it made it's subject-matter unnecessarily abstract and academic. For academic, read "divorced from practical application". For all practical purposes, you always need to read another book after reading one of Mr Box's "essential" books.

I think the main reason "Essential COM" was such a runaway success is NOT that it was the best COM book, by any stretch of the imagination, but that it was the FIRST printed book which took COM seriously. Perhaps the author is trying to repeat this success with XML? If you ask me, he's taking XML way too seriously. By buying this book you're only going to encourage Mr Box to write more books like this one; now wouldn't that be a waste.

My advise: get a book thats more geared to the platform(s) you're developing for, and if you're interested in arcana then look up the W3C infoset stuff on the web. But hey, if you're a diehard Box fan, I guess you're gonna get this book anyway.

I checked this book out of the library before investing in it, and am glad I did. I assumed that it was an introductory book to XML. The author begins with an unbelievably pretentious introduction to XML that sounds like a programmer talking shop with other programmers in a contest to sound self-knowledgable and important. Box takes a reasonably understandable subject and makes it unbelievably complex, vague and abstract, in an unnecessarily stuffy and overblown prose style. He writes as if the reader already understands the entire subject, and the reader will have to in order to follow Boxes' inaccessible style. I think this word pretty fairly sums up this book; books should make a subject accessible, and this book makes it inaccessible, if not incomprehensible. Not for beginners or even experienced programmers not familiar with XML.

On the .NET mailing list Don Box wrote, "We both dislike the first chapter and need to rewrite chapters 4 and 6..." nuff said.

I returned this book. This book, Essential XML, opened far too many questions that it did not answer. In addition, it was difficult to understand exactly what the others point was in various sections. The text would meandor through a series of interface eleborations, never quite showing you what you were supposed to be learning from the discussion. It presented lots of 'statements of fact' with little insight from the author as to how all of this knowledge can be harnessed at shaped into something functional. Read the reviews carefully before possibly wasting you time on this one.

Very big disappointment, almost as big as Don Box's ego! Lotsof errors and inaccuracies, clearly written in haste to catch the XML bandwagon. The chapter on SOAP is ridiculous, in particular considering that Box was supposed to have been instrumental in the development of SOAP. I sure hope that's not the herald of the other books in the DevelopMentor series...

Too many people (myself included) jumped on the bandwagon as soon as they saw 'Don Box'. The book is more suited for a study in an academic environment as opposed to us in the real world who have delivery schedules and have to learn technology effectively.

A full third of the book is just a regurgitation of other (out of date, even at print time) resources found on the web.

This book is probably more eye candy on your bookshelf versus something developers can actually use to help them do their jobs.

Essential XML commits the worst sin of any technical work: it assumes its readers are already familiar with the subject matter. Reading this book is is like joining a competitive high-level college course in mid-semester--one feels behind from the start.

Perhaps the authors feel that readers who would admit to a need for a more gradual approach to the material are beneath their consideration as being weak technically. It's unfortunate that omniscience is one of the assumed attributes of the hacker.

I for one am not omniscient, but prefer texts where the authors and editors have made a reasonable effort to present the material in a way accessible to readers with varying levels of prior expertise.

The problem with this book is that it is too abstract, not practical. In the 'real world' of software development, we need examples that apply.

If you want to talk philosophy and examine odd insights, buy this book.

If you want to really build XML solutions, don't.