Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

"SAMS Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes" is an introductory text for people who want to learn XML. While the author covers XML in sufficient detail for the complete novice to understand, he also gives illustrations of how it resembles and differs from HTML. I have done some basic HTML and Java programming before and found that the transition to learning XML was easy with the assistance of this book. It contains enough basic stuff that nothing important is missed but moves along quick enough to keep it from becoming repetitive and boring. By the end I not only could write simple XML documents, but also was working with Cascading Style Sheets and the Document Object Model. This is a great introductory course that equips the reader with all the basics of XML. There is a lot more to XML than what is in this book, but "SAMS Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes" is a thorough course in the basics of XML. This is a recommended purchase for anyone wanting to get a basic level understanding of XML.

I've been a software engineer for 20+ years. This is the worst technical book that I can recall. Way too many forward references - "Now I'll use a technical term that I won't explain for another two chapters".

Most technical books have some forward references but this is ridiculous. To make it worse, some of the terms are never clearly explained even when you get to that section of the book.

The real title should be "Learn all about what XML is, with a few examples, in a bit over 3 hours, ten minutes at a time." But that wouldn't sell the book by its cover. Very clear, following the "tell you, tell you, told you" style. A bit dry but mostly very easy learning since it's in ten-minute chunks. Takes the mystery out of XML. Opens your eyes to all that it can do. Finally makes clear what a "DOM" is (document object model.

I really like the Teach Yourself In 10 min books and own a number of them. This is clearly the weakest that I've encountered. It reads like an abridged version of a number of related (dry) specifications spiked with a couple of examples.

I'll grant that making XML interesting is hard. After all the topics covered are much more than specifications; however, the lack of details on use cases and implementation was unfortunate. This problem was made worse by the age of the book and thus relative obsolescence of many of the implementations referenced.

The other major problem is the distribution of effort. Every heading in the book got roughly equally treatment regardless of complexity. The result is that relatively simple concepts are covered in ponderous detail while more complex topics provide little more information than an annotations of a single working example would.

An updated book with more discussion of contemporary applications and the whys and hows of XML with less discussion of trivial whats would be nice.

All of that said, I wasn't looking for an expert understanding just a baseline familiarity and I feel like I got that out of this book (or at least enough to inform a couple of high yield google searches). I read every page, it was painful at times but possible.

The material is there for learning XML basis, but the prose is hard to wade through. I think the writing could be cut down by about 40% if needless verbage was removed.

I was still confused about XML namespaces after reading the chapter on namespaces.

The first chapter on XSLT had decent example code, but the explanations were very difficult to follow.

The book is written in a very boring English. The author tries to describe everything in text, whereas a simple example would have gone a long way.
The examples are scarce inside the text. Well, at least "good examples" are... Whenever the author reaches the simple concepts such as parsed entities, he gives a couple of examples, but for more complicated ones such as unparsed, the examples are vague and trivial.
The same goes for explaining the attributes: CDATA is explained thoroughly (as in all other resources available on the web), but ID, IDREF, NMTOKEN,... just mentioned in one line, without a single example. I had to spend a lot of time surfing the web to find some clear explanations.
You could argue that he was trying to present a brief introduction. Well, that's not exactly true. He tries to touch everything, but in the least clear way possible.
There are tons of better books on XML out there. Don't waste your time and money.

I have tried to read this book over the course of two weeks, I can't get more than a couple pages without nearly passing out. This thing reads like stereo instructions. I can not comment on how accurate the information is, as the author is so boring, I can't retain any of it. No specific examples, all very vauge references.

The author uses lots of phrases which are explained very quickly, and to vague to be of much use. This is a book for beginners, and you wont come very far reading this book, but you might, perhaps, learn the basics.