XForms Essentials (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

XForms Essentials is an introduction and practical guide to the new XForms specification. Written by Micah Dubinko, a member of the W3C XForms working group and an editor of the specification, the book explains the how and why of XForms, showing readers how to take advantage of them without having to write their own code. You'll learn how to integrate XForms with both HTML and XML vocabularies, and how XForms can simplify the connection between client-based user input and server-based processing. XForms Essentials begins with a general introduction to web forms, including information on history and basic construction of forms. The second part of the book serves as a reference manual to the XForms specification. The third section offers additional hints, guidelines, and techniques for working with XForms. XForms Essentials focuses on the practical application of XForms technology. If you work with forms, HTML, or XML information, XForms Essentials will provide you with a much simpler route to more sophisticated interactions with users.

About the Author

Micah Dubinko serves as an editor and author of the XForms 1.0 W3C specification, where he has participated in the XForms effort since September 1999, nine months before the official Working Group was chartered. He's on WC3's XForms committee, knows XForms inside and out, and often acts as a spokesperson on XForms within the W3C and at conferences. He works in San Diego at Cardiff Software, Inc., as a Senior Software Engineer and Chief XML Architect. Over the last four years he has helped determine Cardiff's technical XML strategy and designed and implemented key XML support across several product lines, as well as worked in Product Management. Micah Dubinko was awarded CompTIA CDIA (Certified Document Imaging Architech) certification in January 2001. Micah is the author of XForms Essentials.

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (August 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596003692
• ISBN-13: 978-0596003692
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #96,303 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential XForms read, November 30, 2003

By	Mr. M. J. Seaborne (Scotland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The author is a member of the W3C XForms Working Group, so he knows what he is talking about. This guide is a great starting point for getting to grips with XForms whether or not you are already familiar with HTML forms. This is a much better place to start than the XForms spec, which is pretty impenetrable to your average forms author. Micah takes you through the basics, shows you where XForms fits with other W3C standards, and gets you started with authoring. Once you are feeling a bit more confident this book serves as an excellent reference. One of the really nice things about the book is that there isn't too much of it. It gives a good grounding in the subject without any waffle. In the course of my work I have spoken to several others who have similarly found Micahs book to be an essential starting point to XForms, and a solid reference book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb Book, March 3, 2004

By	Kurt Cagle "kurtcagle" (Seattle, WA US) - See all my reviews

XForms is, very quietly, changing the way that we view the web, putting it on a much more solid XML based footing. While the specification is difficult to comprehend at the best of times, the power of the specification is such that it provides a solid basis on which to build the XML web.

Micah Dubinko's book cuts through a great deal of complexity of the form and illustrates in clear, concise examples how the most critical features are used, elucidates much of the reasoning behind how certain features evolved (a bonus coming from his days helming the XForms specification itself) and otherwise provides a thorough yet easy to understand introduction to what is undoubtably one of the most important specifications to come out of the W3C.

My company is using XForms to build significant portions of our infrastructure upon my guidance, and I hand a copy of this book out to each one of my programmers. If you deal with XML at all, this book should absolutely be part of your library.

Kurt Cagle
Chief Technology Architect
Seattle Book Company
and Author (SVG Programming, XQuery Kickstart, Beginning XML, etc.)

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Read the W3C documents instead., December 11, 2004

By	Jake Burkey (Pullman, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is a poor introduction to XForms. In a text that is only slightly larger than a pamphlet, the author attempts to do much more than simply introduce XForms, and the result is that nothing ends up being explained well.

The relatively few pages of the author's own creation are written in a prose so terse that in some places it reads like gibberish, and the rest of the text is a reference that repeats what is available in the W3C XForms and XPath specifications and the XForms for HTML Authors document.