Customer Reviews

Schaum's Easy Outline of XML

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

 

 

I would not characterise this book as being elegant in phrase. Yet in a somewhat mechanistic way, it does teach the basics of XML. Enough so that you can understand DTDs, Schemas, mixed content mode etc. Where, for example, you hopefully appreciate that mixed content should be avoided if you are defining a new XML application. A little ironic, because XML came from SGML, and the latter is often used in mixed mode.

If you need a quick way to learn XML, this book should be adequate. But if you have time, try consulting a more comprehensive text.

Quick and dirty introduction to XML.

It does not give details on how to structure your data in XML, i.e. what should I call my elements, how should I develope my DOM.

This book will quickly run your through an XML document, XML schema, XML DTD, and DOM & SAX.

If you don't know jak about XML, you may find that this guy just does not know how to write. When I read (top of p. 4) "a tag is simply the opening or closing tag or the empty tag", that was it, I gave up (think of a good analogy.. "a noun is a type of word"; "an electronic device is a thing that uses electronics"). I'm sure Ed is good at all things XML but he is clearly a programmer who can't explain. Lots of definitions to memorize, but no clear examples that would clarify what takes a thousand words to read. Markup is thrown around without clearly definition; historical context would have helped, eg, troff and nroff, Latex, with embedded tags,
the similarity to HTML's presentation aspect... It's an OK book but hard to read. On the plus side, it is fairly concise. I give it a C- to D.