Customer Reviews

Professional XML Schemas

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

 

 

I bought this book because I was looking for a updated reference on the recently released W3C XML Schema Recomendation, and there very few options available. Well, now I can see why. This book, although up to date, seems to have been written in a hurry, and suffers from the common rush diseases:
a) Wrox seems to be speeding the print process by getting several authors to write different sections of a book. The result is a book with a complete lack of unity, and a lot of repeated themes throughout the book. The bad writers end up tainting the good ones work.
b) It abounds in typos and revision errors. I have never before seen a so badly revised book in my life. Some words like "however", for example, are capitalized everywhere they appear!
c) It is also full of real misleading errors. The section on patterns and regular expressions is a complete disaster, with lots of incorrect examples, incomprehensible sentences and ill-designed tables.
The only reason for my two stars are the last chapters, which have good tips for schema design and explain how it relates to other XML stuff, like XSLT and Schematron. These are indeed valuable, and are the product of the good writers in (a). If you want a reliable tutorial/reference to XML Schema, however, get yourself another book.

This is the best XML Schema book I have read in recent days. I am especially grateful for the comprehensive discussion on Namespaces and tricks and trades of managing multiple schemas. There were a lot of books addressing the XML Schemas but they just give a chapter or two for this otherwise important topic in XML world.

Most of the books I read in Stacys gave at the most couple of pages to discuss the Namespaces topic. However this book spent more than two chapters discussing this issue. The book also covers Design issues and best practices being discussed in XML-Dev.

An earlier review of this book talked about incorrect examples. Well, as a career programmer I just take the examples as examples. There might be some syntactic errors, which are easy to resolve. I guess the publisher provides a download link for the corrected examples. I know it's a drag to get these; nevertheless it's a solution.

This book is worth the price for its discussion of modeling documents vs modeling data. Coming from the document world, I have found relational database types have a hard time understanding the "model" of a document schema. This book explains the document analysis process concisely, but clearly. If you work in a place that is trying to bring the document and database worlds closer together, this book is helpful.

The book does not cover very good examples on each topic specially on Datatypes. Also it is not exclusive on detailing schemas. The kind of material/information provided by this book can be read from any core xml book. XML Bible describes the Schemas very well in one chapter.

This is a nice XML Schemas book. It goes through the material thorougly with examples. It also brings up case-scenerios that help one think about tackling the projects we are likely to encounter (or in my case currently encountering) in our XML doings.

Although there are some typos they do not glare the fine material in this book nor hinder learning.

I had to create an XML schema out of an XML file that was already existing (I am sure that rarely happens:-)) and I could get the job done by reading half of this book. Would be a five star if not for the typos.

This is a much better way of learning to write XML schemas compared to formal language at the XML schema specification site.

The book helped me preparing for the IBM certificate for XML (IBM certified solution developer - XML and related technologies), thank you...