Customer Reviews

Real World XML

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Inside XML by Steven Holzner is probably the most comprehensive book written on XML so far. Each of the one thousand and fifty nine pages (excluding index) contains judicious and practical information for anyone willing to learn almost everything about XML. The logical organization of knowledge and adroit arrangement of information in the book make reading a joy. Can this be the only book you need to read about XML? I think yes.

XML indeed is the future of business and communication on the net. Many analysts believe that despite its wonderful portability and universal compatibility, XML has yet to achieve practitioners' acceptance and approbation. XML standards have not been practiced as ubiquitously as analysts had expected. List of major reasons for its slow advance includes lack of browser support and functional inconsistencies of currently available XML parsers. I always believed that "lack of quality literature on XML" also contributed to XML's limited success. "Inside XML" has definitely eliminated this particular reason from my list of reasons for XML's slow progress.

Author has discussed CSS, DOM and SAX parsers, XSL, XHTML, RDF and CDF with the help of relevant and interesting examples. This was missing in some of the recent books on XML. I recently read three other books on XML including Benoit Marchal's XML by example and John Simpson's Just XML. I found Inside XML more useful as it covers a much broader range of topics and technologies than those covered elsewhere. Important topics such as server-side XML are covered in a way that an instructor can develop instructional plans based on this coverage. A detailed discussion on Microsoft specific technologies has made this book a great resource for programmers and developers too. Inside XML can be used to develop certification material. Material presented in this book can also be used for developing a one-semester senior level course on XML technologies.

This book has a high information-value to price ratio and I can confidently recommend the book to anyone interested in practicing XML for the real world. Students, developers and instructors can equally benefit from the material presented in this book.

This book is exciting. It suits xml novices and experts.

What's good in this book:

1. Both for beginners and advanced. More advanced than <<XML by example>> and <<Java and XML>, easier to read and more practical than <<Professional XML>>.

2. Both microsoft and non microsoft.

3. XML schemas, it's quite new and it's well explained in the book.

4. Java and DOM, Java and SAX. More advanced than <<Java and XML>>.

5. It is good to introduce XHTML, it is a bridge between HTML and XML and is becoming popular.

6. Introductions to different special XML Markup Language.

7. Infosets and Canonical XML (in Chapter 1).

Some opinions:

Presentation can be improved, code can be made downloadable, can have more on a) XML for deplayment (of JSP, EJB, J2EE, ...), b) SOAP, c) XSP, d) WML and e) Java with JSP, ASP

Inside XML Inside XML, written by Steven Holzner, is an excellent start for a beginning web programmer as well for an experienced web site developer. The author has succeeded in explaining the variety of subjects concerning XML in a very understandable way. He has achieved this by presenting very complex items in such a way that the items become very simple to understand. The book also provides useful examples and references to sites for more information on the subjects. The book delivers a complete overview and covers the following items: DTDs, XML schemas, client-side XML handling using DOM and JavaScript, server-side handling using DOM, SAX and Java. Related items like XSL, XSLT, VML, SMIL, HTML+TIME, XHTML, RDF, CDF are discussed. Last but not least the book describes how to combine CSS with XHTML/XML. The book is very usable for creating XML courseware, for beginning and experienced web developers. I personally enjoyed the reading of this book, and felt that my time and money was well spent. The book is complete. Readers get a helicopter view of the sprawling XML subject, and leave the book with the knowledge they need to start using XML, and references to site where they can continue learning. It's a real appetizer.

Do you want to learn about the personal preferences of the author? Do you want to learn that Microsoft Internet Exporer is the best thing that ever happened to the humanity? Then this book is for you!

Do you want to learn about XML technologies? Then it is definitely a wrong book.

I do not completely agree with the previous reviewer that the book is poorly organized. The fact is that in spite of its 1000 pages, it has essntially no material to be organized. Almost on every other page, the same lengthy example is reprinted. Of course, it could've been shortened -- to make the point it illustrates more clear -- but then it would have reduced the total number of pages in the book...

The book is useless both for the beginner and for the intermediate level. It has no systematic description of the language or its features. In fact, there is no more or less full (not to mention good) description of any of the topics covered in this book. In stead, the book contains chapters on Java, Perl and JavaScript. Never mind, that these chapters contain no information that could be used. The Perl chapter, for example, simply contains the printout of Perl modules available on CPAN. As long as it makes the book bigger...

The author apparently has never heard about Xerces and Xalan parsers and only from rumors heard about the existence of non-Windows operating systems.

So if you are looking for something to use as a weight -- buy this book.

This book is a must-buy!! It's the most complete and up-to-date book on XML I've seen. It's the one that stays right next to my desk.

The presentation style is the best I've seen on XML, and helps unravel really difficult problems in a clear and error-free style. It's also far more complete than any other XML book I've seen. There's even a great chapter on XML schemas, the first full treatment I know of on this complex topic.

It covers what you'd expect: DTDs, core XML, XPointers, XLinks, etc., using many examples and with a clarity that is unusual in this field. The author then goes on to include the latest and greatest: XML schemas, two chapters on XHTML, XSLT, using XML parsers on Web servers, and more. Part of a chapter even discusses WML. The detailed examples really help.

I also liked the coverage of working with Java XML parsers, which goes into more detail than many dedicated books on the subject. It really seems that it's just about all here, an amazing achievement for any book on XML

To sum up: this is THE book on XML.

A MUST-BUY!!

This book is big, has lots of information, and is easy to read and understand. There is a ton of code samples in it, and the book does a good job at highlighting changes made as it steps through modification of a piece of code.

I also like that it mentions and points out those little differences between the Microsoft end of the world, and the rest of the world.

This is the third book on XML I have brought recently, and by far the best. Would recommend highly to anyone starting out with XML or an experienced XML user.

The most intelligent and easy-to-follow guide to XML standards. This book gives you what you need to know to be productive with existing XML tools right now. Many books give you the basics; this one explains the conventions of designing XML document types in detail. After several chapters of in-depth material on how to design XML documents, the book turns to using XML in actual browsers (both in Netscape and Internet Explorer). That is must since both combined control over 92% of the browser market.

Excellent sections covering XML standards, like XLinks and Xpointers. You'll learn how to use Java with XML, including navigating the XML Document Object Model using IBM's XML for Java. The book also covers displaying XML with several existing standards, including XHTML, VML and the Resource Description Framework for allowing XML-based content searching. Final sections look at combining XML with Perl and Java and give a glimpse at wireless content created with the Wireless Markup Language. The book is a excellent intro for any developer or IT manager who needs to understand and use XML and what its related technologies can do.

I don't know how this book has 4 1/2 stars on reviews, I really think that the author is more concerned on the number of pages than on explaining XML.

I don't deny that the author knows about the topic, but I just think that the deadline to finish the book was too close or that he doesn't knows how to organize his ideas. He starts talking about one thing but then he mentions some property about that and he gives a brief explanation then he says that he will cover it later and then he gives you the same explanation but with a better example.

Also, he claims to have a lot of examples but you will find that the examples are just the same, he prefers to write a 50 lines example again and again on the book than just writting the new thing he want to comment.

So I really think that the author though that a 1100 pages book would be more attractive to the customers.

Just finishing learning HTML only to find that XML is now more widely accepted and you need a book to help you learn what this language has to offer. Stop looking and get a hold of the book Inside XML and you'll find a world of information enclosed in the 1000 plus pages.

The author takes chapter 1 to break down XML resources and validators, then has chapter 2 delve into well formed documents with great detail, making sure that no stone is left unturned and that you have every bit of information at your disposal.

Move on to topics like DTD, basics of java scripting, CSS, XSL and DOM. The author goes beyond the scope of the book to give you coverage of XHTML 1.0 and 1.1. Then is that's not enough the author adds information on VML, WML, ASP, JSP and perl languages making this one complete manual.

Using great examples to learn from as well as an abundance of diagrams and figures you have everything you need. The book is made for the designer with intermediate to advanced HTML and java Scripting understanding.

About the only thing the author has missed with is there's no cd-rom with working examples to allow you to practice with. Although there is ample examples in the book, this should not detract from the books overall value and worth.

One of the best XML books I have read in the last few months. The explanation of the beginning and advanced topics is very clearly setup and will help you understand the topics covered in the books no matter if you are a beginner or more advanced programmer.

The first chapters of this book are a great introduction from XML validators and other resources to well formed documents DTD's and Schemas, this will give you a understanding of the fundamentals of XML and now you can get more aquainted with all the other parts of XML development explained in the rest of the book.

Now that you know the fundamentals of XML you can start with the more advanced topics like eg SAX and the DOM to manipulate you data. In order to use these however you need to step beyond the scope of pure XML and dive into programming or scripting languages. The author choose to use Javascript and Java in this book. However you can argue if the chapters about "getting into Javascript" and "Getting into Java" are at place in a book about XML I personally feel that it was a good choice and I enjoyed reading the "Getting into Java" chapter before getting my hands dirty with Java and XML. And if you know these topics allready you can just skip these chapters.

And if this is not enough the following chapters will give you basic understanding of topics like using XML together with CSS, XHTML, WML, JSP, ASP and pearl. It also gives you an introduction of a new method of using XML as a description of Graphics and animation. This books mentions a few thing about SVG (scalable vector graphics), but goes into VML (vector markup language) in a lot more detail. My personal opinion is that this was a wrong choice because as things are now much more effort goes into SVG than VML. This also shows about the amount of resources there are on the web for SVG compared to VML.

Some other nice feautures of this book is the more than usual coverage of the JAVA XML coverage and the 100s of examples spread throughout the book, altho it would be nice if the samples could be downloaded from the web or were available on an accompanying CD.

In conclusion: This is a very well written book that is aimed to both the beginning as advanced developers, a few things that I missed in this book were a more detailed coverage of SOAP, there was only a slight mentioning in the whole book annd SOAP is becoming so popular that it deserver more detailed coverage. Info about C++ XML parsing, the JAVA and Javascript chapters were a GEM, but a bit info about C++ JAVA parsing would have made the book more complete. We all know that nothing gets more out of date than books about programming, that is also the cause of some of the lesser points I described above. But this is easily fixed, just get a book that explains the subject of your choice in more detail, for myself I am eagerly awaiting the JAVA XML and C++ XML books announced from New Riders.

All in all, its hard to find a better XML book than this one.