Customer Reviews

Learning XSLT

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Target Audience
Developers who are looking for an entry level text to learn XSLT and XPath.

Contents
This is a tutorial guide for teaching yourself the fundamentals of Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, or XSLT.

The book contains the following chapters: Preface; Transforming Documents with XSLT; Building New Documents with XSLT; Controlling Output; Traversing the Tree; XPath and XSLT Functions; Copying Nodes; Using Variables and Parameters; Sorting Things Out; Numbering Lists; Templates; Using Keys; Conditional Processing; Working with Multiple Documents; Alternative Stylesheets; Extensions; XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0; Writing an XSLT Processor Interface; Parting Words; Appendix: XSLT Processors; Glossary; Index

Review
While XML is becoming the de facto standard for data exchange between programs and platforms, it does nothing to allow the reader to see the data in a useful, formatted output. And, since XML is not concerned about presentation of data, that's proper. What you need is some way to turn that data into readable output based on the reader's needs. To do that, you use XSLT. That's where this book comes into play.

Michael Fitzgerald has written a concise, easy-to-follow book that will allow you to start working with the XSLT language. Since this book is not combined with every other XML technology known to man, you will not get lost in a morass of acronyms or concepts that would quickly confuse the beginner. The focus is just XSLT, and the assumption is that you are approaching the language for the first time. There are a number of examples that give you hands-on experience during the learning process, and most of the examples also show a screen print of the browser output so that you know if you were successful with your coding. The code can also be downloaded from the book's website, so if you just want to skip to the output, you can do that.

The author doesn't try to write for both the beginner and the expert. Since the focus is on the beginning XSLT coder, the person with an existing base of XSLT experience may not find this book of much use. I don't say that as a gripe against the book, rather as a way to manage your expectations. It's better than a "For Dummies" title, but it's not an exhaustive guide to all that is XSLT. If you fall into the target audience, you should gain a lot from this title.

Conclusion
Learning XSLT is a very good choice to start your foray into the world of XML transformations. You should come away with the basic information you need to be effective and continue to expand your experience.

While XSLT isn't a complex language, its declarative and template-based nature can make harder than expected to learn it, especially for people used to procedural languages. That's why a book like this, which provides a solid introduction to XSLT, may be more valuable than you would expect. The author manages to assemble an entry-level book without writing another useless "for dummies" guide. Fitzgerald filled the book with a huge amount of practical examples; you get plenty of code listings that often build on top of each other; incrementing the complexity along the way (an effective choice). In my opinion the writing style isn't always crystal clear and the author often introduce topics too early, briefly mentioning things that get a full explanation only a few chapters later. Notwithstanding this shortcoming, I think it's an excellent book that can really help getting started with XSLT. I would suggest to read it in a linear fashion, from beginning to the end in order to get the best out of it.

I found Learning XSLT confusing from a beginner's point of view. It's poorly indexed, and Fitzgerald often uses XSLT vocabulary in examples long before he explains what they are. For example the "select" attribute first appears on page 105 in an example describing the lang() function, without any explanation of what it is or how it should be used. It's not listed at all in the index except in relation to the "for-each" and "sort" elements. He has a nice list of string functions but not much explanation of what kinds of contexts they can be used in, and few examples. He doesn't really explain how "match" and "select" are used together, or how processing works hierarchically by jumping between xsl snippets. Like a lot of O'Reilly books it presumes a pretty sophisticated programming vocabulary (like what does "normalize" mean anyway?).

Some sections are quite useful however, and the fact that there are lots of examples is very helpful.

That such a poor quality book should come from O'Reilly is baffling. The book is very poorly organized, not covering templates--the basis of XSLT--until chapter 10! The author's examples are convoluted and unrevealing, and mostly seem to prove the point that his understanding of XSLT is far greater than yours. I got through the first three chapters and then gave up for a Sams book, which is much better.

I'm a software documentation specialist and Java programmer who needed a text that would enable me to read a few chapters, get the gist, and start applying XSLT at work, looking up details as I go. I think Mr. Fitzgerald had another audience in mind when he wrote this book.

Discussions of big-picture concepts like how templates work and XPath in the early chapters of the book were not, in my opinion, adequately expansive and often digressed into what I consider peripheral detail. Information about templates that I consider key to understanding how a stylesheet works was not addressed until Chapter 10. And I had to lean heavily on the W3C's XPath Recommendation because I could not find important details about XPath in the single-chapter coverage the author provides.

This book offers virtually no practical advice on how to approach transformation of complex, real-world markup. The examples are short, contrived, and generally uninformative, beyond providing basic syntax.

I purchased this book because my employer offers discounts on O'Reilly books, and of the XSLT titles O'Reilly offers, this one seemed closest to my needs. Probably should have looked harder.

Late one evening last week I was stuck needing to write some XSL code before an important deadline the next day. Having never written any XSL before, I turned to "Learning XSLT." After spending about two hours studying the excellent examples in the book, I was able to complete the stylesheet I needed which contains about 100 lines of code and 10 templates. I highly recommend the book to anyone needing to get up-to-speed quickly on XSLT.

The information is presented very dryly. The tone of the book is very taxing on the readers attention span.

I find that one of the key tenets of these O'Reilly books is that they are usually very readable, and can be read front to back almost like a novel. I didn't find I was able to do this with Learning XSLT.

Maybe it's the subject matter or maybe its the authors inability to hook the reader. Either way, it didn't work for me.

Granted that XSLT is a confusing topic, and granted that this is supposed to be an introduction rather than a reference, but this disappointing book does not make the subject any more approachable. The author skips all over the place, including coverage of peripherally related topics that would have been better in an appendix (e.g., code points?).

The book is further flawed by an absolutely useless index. Many important terms do not appear in the index at all, and others reference a passing mention in the text rather than a useful discussion.

Imagine you just bought a new car and stuck the keys in the ignition. Do you worry about every little minute detail of what's under the hood? Or do you just plant your foot down on the accelerator and drive?

Learning XSLT is one of those books that has a strange "hiccup" feel to it. Reading this book is like putting your foot down on the accelerator, only to have a chicken cross in front of you to slam on the brakes and then accelerate again. Only then, having another chicken cross and yet again slam on the brakes. Tutorials are meant to be smooth, uninterrupted reading. Learning XSLT is an abrupt stop and go journey that resulted in it being tossed into the far back shelf of my personal library.

For example, a really annoying feature in the book's layout are the icons and box comments. Frequently, they interrupt the flow causing switching of mental gears. Often too wordy, too detailed, and downright puzzling to why they even exist in the first place, they are anal and annoying. Surely the intricacies of QCNames, Code Points, Unicode, xml:lang attribute in every minute detail should have been removed out of this book.

As an example of how poorly this book reads, I point to page 9. The section is "Using apply-templates". Two pages later of long winded overanalysis (and yet another interruption with a large box comment regarding Unicode), we end up with a trivial six line example using apply-templates. Boldfaced and detached away from the original point of discussion. By this time, the reader is flipping pages to go back to recall what the entire section was about. That is the general feel of this book - a lack of cohesiveness.

After reading the first three chapters, I wondered where this book was heading. It read in scatter brained pieces and often too detailed for my liking - overly informative to be of any practical use. If you like getting bogged down in trivia minutiae, this is your book.

The examples were poor and unfufilling; rarely showing a big picture example in a larger, useful, practical context. Most of the people who pick up this book will want to transform XML into XHTML - which this book fails to address in a dedicated chapter.

Templates, the most important feature from a coding structure and development standpoint, is held off until Chapter 10. This should have been moved to earlier chapters, followed by discussion of axes, functions, XPATH, etc.

Learning XSLT does not to a very good job of organizing content for understanding and instruction. It definitely failed to hold my attention. Out of all the O'Reilly books I have, this one was not very useful and needs a total rewrite!

I bought this book after using the O'Reilly book "Web Design In A Nutshell". In general, I find the O'Reilly books to be pretty good. This book looked pretty good in the bookstore, too. After working with it, however, I found it difficult to get through and difficult to learn from. I used online sources to learn XSLT and used this book as a reference. When I learned something online and went back to this book, I was able to see what the author of this book was trying to explain. (I am not a web page beginner. I have worked in software development for a number of years. I have worked with HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc.)