Customer Reviews

Inside XSLT

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

 

 

I am looking at the three XSLT books I have read over the past few months, Wrox's Professional XSL, Addison Wesley's The XSL Companion, and New Rider's Inside XSLT, and have comments about each.

</Wrox> Why 10 Authors? Everyone knows book quality at Wrox's has gone down as sales quantity has gone up. Why do they need 10 Authors to write a single book on XSL? Think about it? The Authors are probably not too comfortable with XML/XSL topics in a "real working environmment". But, if 10 authors can agree on something then it must add some credibility, right? Wrong! 10 Authors does not translate into 10 experts or even 1 in this case.
Wrox added the extra 9 Authors to Professional XSL for page filler. How many readers really care about SVG in an XSL book any way? This one section adds another buck to the price book. Thankfully, the classic cheap trick of appending a 500 page "case study" to the end of the book is skipped. (A sure sign there is nothing left for the Author(s) to discuss, while the buyer still has money left in his pocket.) Although some of the book's content is useful, overall the book it is not unified and is unfocused. It is also terribly guilty of improperly weighting important versus non-important material. This is a big "no-no" in the XML/XSL world since the subject has so many different topics. The short commings of the book can be attributed to the 10 Author approach. Each author is assigned a two chapter contribution - no matter how relevant the subject may be. Unfortunately, Wrox, doesn't mind this presentation style and doesn't think you will either!

</Addison Wesley> The XSL companion represents on of the first XML/XSL book that prove an author can get the job done correctly. This is a pretty good book on XML/XSL. Unfortunately it is way too small and more examples are needed to support the topics. Too bad the Author did not add few hundred more pages.

</New Riders> I am absolutely convinced the author of Inside XSLT, Steve Holzner, understood from the onset that XML/XSL was a difficult topic to cover correctly within one book without losing focus.
Amazingly, Steve Holner has succeeded where other XMl/XSL author's have failed. He has delivered the first logical XML/XSLT text that explains the power and usefulness of XML/XSLT to the reader.
The easy-to-read style mixes XML/XSLT topics with the right amount of supporting examples. In fact, a single XMl text file is modified through out the entire text. This simple, yet effective technique creates a consistency that adds to the readers understanding of each new XML/XSL topic. Everything you expected from XML/XSLT is delivered in this book. The text will surely keep you far ahead of your peers and should be mandatory reading for any XML/XSL developer. Maybe XML/XSL is to young to actually have true experts in the field. But Inside XML will get you closer to being an XML/XSL expert, in faster amount of time than any other XMl/XSL book in print. Excellent Job Steven!

(Newbies: To make things easy, download an XML IDE such as XMLSPY, when testing the examples in this book.)

The rear cover advertises that this book is "written for developers with XML experience". It might be good for such people with a GREAT DEAL OF EXPERIENCE in closely related topics--people who are looking for details; not being such, I cannot answer that with assurance. However, it certainly is not suitable for anyone else, being extremely difficult to follow for a computer scientist with 20+ years experience as a programmer and with fundamentals of languages and systems.

A problem is that the author, being concerned with "books out there never seem to give you enough examples, ... , they're not complete, and they are not up to date" has forgotten that most readers are likely to want to see the forest before inspecting any trees. Indeed, even readers curious about particular trees whose names they don't know will want first to find those particular trees, i.e., even for the programmer who knows XML but not XSLT, I do not believe this likely to be a useful book.

In a nutshell, this book is inside out. The first chapter prominently discusses details of current XSLT evolution that should be in a late chapter that is clearly labeled as being for the few readers who need to know the fine points, or in footnotes. Furthermore, the author seems so focused on examples that one must read much of an example before one understand what it is an example of and whether or not it is useful for one's concern of the moment.

Putting things differently, those programmers who entered the profession after a formal education will look for top-down explanations and patterns expressed in one or more of the languages that were used in their university courses, e.g., BNF, or Snobol, or some other formal means. They need this because one learns most easily from a basis of what one already knows. But one doesn't find it in this book; the non-normative DTD found at the back is neither a good substitute nor sufficiently alluded to in the early chapters.

The value of the book might be as a reference volume. However, since the author did not see it primarily that way, it is not organized with sufficient hints to make it a good reference volume.

Finally, the book is sadly dated, apparently because the author focused on being up-to-date. What I mean is that might be up-to-date in 2002, but the reader who needs to be up to date will in 2003 and later seek other sources if he is at all concerned about aspects that might have changed in this fast-moving topic.

In summary, I believe that 95% of potential readers would be better served by some other text book (now I have to find one for myself). The content is almost surely accurate, but it is not organized and cross-linked to be efficiently useful.

Although Holzner's previous XML book, "Inside XML" is my favorite book on XML, I found this effort to be substandard at best. The presentation is unclear and disorganized, and Holzner repeats himself incessantly, frequently on consecutive pages and sometimes even in consecutive paragraphs! For example, on p. 128 he explains that template conflict resolution is based on select specificity and then repeats this on p. 131 using almost exactly the same words but in a manner indicating that this is some new piece of information. Clearly this book wasn't proofread at all, by either the author or the reviewers. Finally, the lack of inclusion of a summary description of XSLT elements is unforgiveable. In summary, the book is too disorganized to be a reference and too confusing to be a tutorial. It has the feel of a book rushed into publication so that New Riders could add an XSLT title to its library. Michael Kay's book is a better reference and Bob DuCharme's book is a better tutorial.

The projects in the book all center around a single XML structure, planets in the Solar System. Althought the structure is easy to understand, it does not illustrate other more real world problems, so this book is not useful as a cookbook or idea book.

Secondly, the examples show the application of xslt in a simplistic and difficult to understand manner that falls short of the requirements of a reference. It also fails as a reference due to poor organization, poor index, and lack of comprehensive coverage.

Finally, I feel that the author moves too quickly and fails to illustrate complex concepts well enough for this book to be used as a primer.

Overall, I have found this book to be frustrating to use and would recommend that buyers save their money.

I found the book good introduction to XSLT. However it could be more compact. In few places author use just past & copy to include paragraphs which he placed just few hundreds pages before. For me if something is explained in one place, author should not repeat it but just send reader to right paragraph in other part of the book.

Author try to cover all material also tools which can be used with XSLT. In detailed section about Java tools I will expect few worlds about Apache Cocoon. XSP is beyond scope of this book, but if using XSLT in JSP example is included then why not XSP?

For the rest is very good book, and material is explained in good way.

The previous two reviews cover the detail...I will only add to them. I've looked through several XSLT books at length, and this one is by far the best. One of the aspects I like about the book is that it uses the same XML document throught. Various XSLT Transforms are preformed on the document and they systematically build in complexity and scope of features. The transforms start out very simple and progress at a comfortable pace. I'm very happy with it. Steven Holzner has become one of my favorite authors overnight.

This book proved to be just what I needed, and then some. This is the companion volume to 'Inside XML' by the same author. Having read that book first, I was familiar with the author's style. The author starts with a simple example, then explains each new topic by building around that same example. The companion volume provides (in addition to complete coverage of XML) an introduction to XSLT, and this book drills down to the details. I learned more about XSLT than I thought possible. Thanks for a great book.

This book is one of the first books mentioning MSXML and the XmlHttpRequest object. I am happy that I bought this book in 2003. I wrote stunning web controls with MSXML for MS IE. I am proud of myself because I started using Ajax 2 years before Jesse James Garrett published his Ajax article. The book is great with lots of examples.

This is a good book to start with but definitely not the "all in one" XSLT book.
I would suggest to start XSLT with this book and then read "Learning XSLT" as well as "XSLT cookbook".

That combination would make you an expert in a couple of days.

This book follows the example of planets.xml and uses it consistently, but the example gets boring after a while.

The theoretical part is quite clear and easy to follow. However, the examples are rather simplistic. What I would like are some examples that face a real life problem and combines the different parts of xslt into one solution.