Customer Reviews

Relax Ng

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

 

 

I tried learning RELAX NG by looking at a few HOWTOs, but there was clearly a lot more to it than what they presented. This book is clear, detailed, and the verbose examples are very helpful.

Years ago I attended an ASP Professional Developers conference in Washington, DC, and one of the most inspiring lectures was by a Microsoft XML evangelizer who claimed "It's all about the schema". He might have been right, but on practical level, the transition between XML 1.0 DTDs and W3C XML Schema has been neither easy nor intuitive.

The emergence of RELAX NG is a testimony of the power of the open source movement. While admitting the need for standards (and recommendations) it was obvious that the powerful XML Schema would benefit from the ease of DTDs. RELAX NG is the answer to that need.

The book by the same name by Eric van der Vlist provides not only a description of what RELAX NG is and where it fits in the XML universe, but also guides you through a list of techniques, best practices and integration ideas.

For those among us who are not XML gurus, a book like this can be eye-opening because let's face it, you do not hear about RELAX NG outside of the XML community.

O'Reilly has been very good about publishing thorough books on emerging topics and this book is not an exception. It manages to inform yet not overwhelm. What more can you expect from a computer book?

My company uses a very complex XML file to pass information to our core program. In an attempt to cut down on errors I decided to try and set up a schema for the control file. After a 2 weeks of fumbling around on the web I ran across RELAX NG schema and got some examples working.

This book was the best resource I found for learning and writing RELAX NG.

Schema is a pretty complex thing to learn on your own. Yes you can read the tutorials on line, but they don't talk about the particular XML file you are working on, so it's slow going.

Even with this book it was slow going. I'm only giving 4 stars because I think there may have been better ways to teach some of the ideas. I don't know what they are, I just know that it has taken me hours and hours to learn this stuff.

This book is on line as well: [...]
Having a book to browse through, and website to search through really helps. I really appreciate the author and publisher providing the online version.

This is a solid work on Relax NG. The text is very thorough and the author obviously knows what he is talking about. On it's face that makes this a must have book for NG users.

It's not without it's flaws however. The graphics are poor and there could be more done to impart how the Relax NG specifications relate to the specific XML examples they are validating. In addition the book provides little information about tools and support for NG, and also neglects to relate NG to any of the other XML validation standards (DTD, XML Schema.)

For a book about a tough subject it does a lot in a small space. For someone looking for information about NG who is going to apply it in the near term this is a fine work.