Customer Reviews

Open Source XML Database Toolkit: Resources and Techniques for Improved Development

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

 

 

This book is not an application development guide. But it mentions about some *open source* tools and covers some API available in Perl, Java and C towards the end of the book. And the rest of the book is filled with descriptions of other open source tools, not completely irrelevant, but probably you were not looking for and distracting.

If you are just looking for some description of tools or guide to use tools available, I suggest just you spend the time the web and you get lot more useful information than presented in this book.

Even when the author talked about XML Databases, he is mostly interested in Document Management not the data. He did not do justice to the data that can be presented/stored in XML/Database.

This book has some useful information, though it suffers from lack of editing. I thought that a draft copy accidently went to press when I started reading this. Many of the errors in this book are typos, but some of the errors have more to do with presentation and may confuse the reader about the topic.

Open Source XML Database Toolkit does have useful information. Its strength is that it is geared to help readers understand how XML, DBMSs, and all the middleware fit together.

XML and other computer markup and languages use esoteric symbols and naming devices; it is crucial that technical books about these topics get them right consistently. This book doesn't do that, which is why I have given it 2/5 stars. Informative (thus far in my reading), but -3 for poor editing.

The book doesn't claim to be an application development guide, nor is it a database API reference. The world of open source software is changing very rapidly, too, so rather than write about items that would soon be out of date, I tried to focus on techniques and strategies. It's a very broad field, and this is an interdisciplinary book, talking about document management as well as about delivering relational information as XML. It doesn't cover XSLT, nor libxml, but in 432 pages I couldn't have done justice to XSLT, and there have been two released of libxml since publication. So instead, you'll find out about using SAX from C and Perl, and learn enough XML, SQL and network programming to get by, and maybe have some fun along the way.