Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Sams has published a number of good computer language books... but this is not one of those "good" books. It appears this book missed the editor's desk entirely because the content of the book is very poorly presented.

The author seems prepared to rewrite parts of this book and should definitely do so.

If you do buy this book I would ask that you keep notes and then forward them to Sams. In this way Sams can then hopefully delivery a much better product... one which will not be a waste of time while reading.

Jim Osborne San Antonio, Texas

This book has a bad case of Mr. Kimble-itis (the bumbling county agricultural agent from the TV show "Green Acres" who could never get to the point). The author has a hard time getting to the point, and rambles all over the place telling you what it is you don't need to know at this point, but why it is important that I'm not going to tell you about it but will tell you, maybe, at some point later, but, aww' what the heck, here is a bunch of stuff you don't need to know.

The errata sheet is rather long, and some of the errors are so glaring I wonder if anyone edited this thing. I spent an hour trying to figure out why the book appeared to contradict itself in several places on the same page until finding the errata sheet.

I needed a book that would give me a jump start on XML. Normally I am kind of apprehensive about the "Teach yourself Swalhili, Russian, Hungarian and Finnish in just 24 hours!!!" kind of books. I decided to buy it based on the reviews by other readers and it was a good decision. This book really gave me what I needed: a good induction into xml and all related areas and practical examples. However, to my taste the authors could have spent some more on DOM. That is why I rate this book 4 stars.

I've been in a process of trying to learn XML for quite awhile, and the books to be found on this topic have been frustrating. I'm trying to learn something new, but find difficulty learning from book after book that has so many mistakes. I'm able to learn just enough to realize the mistakes in the book, why something isn't working, and then troubleshoot the XML document I'm putting together.

Learning XML is nothing, but producing a VALID document through a Document Type Definition that you must write yourself is harder. You're then learning that process too. Plus..XSL and XSLT..so that the documents are Web usable.

I found Sam's Teach Yourself XML in 21 days better than most books I've worked with so far. The book was helpful. I also appreciated the links offered for great software, one of them being Architag XRay for transformations. It beats using Saxon at a command line.

If you want to learn XML, this book can help you with some basics. A better book is Real World XML by Steven Holzner.

I think the book is a great challenge! It lets you find out the answers for yourself rather than just chewing them out. Everybody knows that the best way to learn something is to play with it and find out for yourself! I am surprised by the fact that a lot of the reviews are so negative. Don't these people think for themselves? The book is very helpfull and it did teach me a lot!!

Marie Duchateau

I've been disappointed by Sams before but this probably was the ultimate money-waste. I felt lucky that my workplace bought this book and not me, but I was forced to read it nonetheless. I must say that after the first 7 days you feel as if you're supposed to know enough about XML, yet when you sit at your desk trying to contrsuct something out of your knowledge, you realize you've learned nothing. Your countless hours infront of this book had gone to waste. It doesn't teach, it lectures. And it's structure is something to laugh about. Instead of teaching you how to make the simplest XML page and then show it with your IE5, it waits untill the 11th day to do that. Makes no sense at all. Stay away from this book... You should wait for Wrox to publish their version of XML tutoring, just to see how these aces cope with it.

I was originally teaching myself XML from the W3 and microsoft documentations, but decided to get a book that would provide some application relevance in the learning process. As XML and its associated subsets have evolved this book has become outdated. However the inaccuracies resulting from the evolution of XML after the release of this book are minor in comparison to the contradicting statements and blatant errors present throughout the book. The unfortunate fact is that if you don't already know XML you will not be able to decipher error from fact.

I have bought a number of Sams books and found most of them very instructive, but this book was a total waste of time and money. There's no logical pattern to learning XML presented in this text. Topics are scattered and there's no recognizable learning pattern. There are too many references to SGML and HTML, and too few XML hand-on examples. If you need to understand the history and similarities of XML to HTML and SGML, go ahead and buy this book. If you need to apply XML or need to develop a good understanding of it for future development, look into a book that walks you through the development of practical applications.

I don't normally write reviews. I think I've done it maybe a half dozen times. And I wasn't planning on writing a review for this one. But I just couldn't hold back any longer.

This book is absolutely awful. Now I understand the problem with these books - you need to break things down into easy to bite chunks, and there are times when that is not possible. But where these authors draw those lines is ridiculous! There is no real rhyme or reason to the lay-out of the book. The authors cover DTD's in about 6 different chapters, and normally it's a touch of DTD with everything else and my favorite phrase "as you'll see in later chapters". If we're going to see it in later chapters, don't cover it here!

Don't purchase this book. It's not worth the money. Check out Inside XML instead if you're looking for a book. It's laid out much better and covers a wider set of topics.

This is the first terrible written technical book I ever have read. I read the first four days of the contents, I still didn't know how to use XML in my work. Then I went to internet, did a extensive research on XML. Then I moved back to this book again, and re-started from day one. Not too far before I realized the problems of this book: 1. The author has profound knowledge of XML, SGML, HTML, and Markup language in general. 2. The author lacks profound knowledge of software engineering in general. 3. The author tried to analyze and position XML at the more general software engineering level, instead of focusing on syntatic and semantic ---> that causes the trouble. 4. The author lacks the ability to clearly express a concept, a principl.