Customer Reviews

XML: The Annotated Specification

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

 

 

If you need to get up to speed on the XML recommendation for serious application development, this book is a very informative explanation of W3C's results. It's an excellent reference work. It provides thoughtful insights into some fairly complicated subjects. Colleagues wanted to read my first copy so much that I bought another one. It is not a tutorial, not a hands-on code walk-through, and not for the casual user. It's precisely what it says it is -- the "annotated specification".

This contains the XML specification with annotation by the author. Text from the specification is printed on shaded background so there is no confusing the specification and the author's annotation. One of the design goals of the XML working group was: "The design of XML shall be formal and concise." The PDF version of the specification runs to thirty-two pages. So, an annotated version of the specification is welcome. Annotation consists of illustration, clarification, background and examples. While the blurb on the back cover says that the book includes over 170 "real-world" examples, that is a stretch. The author frequently uses intuitively meaningful element and attribute names in meaningless combinations. For example, this is offered as an example of an attribute declaration with a default value (p. 111): <!ATTLIST chapter flavor CDATA "mint">. In a similar vein, the author provides illustrations of element content models with no apparent use. For example, <!ELEMENT section (chapter, (appendix|index)*, glossary)>. Real "real-world" examples facilitate not only our formal understanding of XML, but also its proper use. Having said all that, I should add that I do think the book worthwhile. Note that this is on the recommended reading list for IBM's XML certification test.

Despite some problems relating to clarity, I gave this book 4 stars because it fills a dire need: it provides annotation and rationale to an otherwise tedious, opaque specification. (I don't mean to single out the XML spec here; it's better than most. Specifications, by their very nature [i.e., formal] are difficult to read.)

The book has been very useful to me, not as an introduction to XML, but as a reference.

I am a director in the Financial Services practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. DuCharme's book is an essential part of our syllabus for XML training. The book is a brilliant reference work and review of the XML language. It is not a tutorial on XML application development, but that is not it's purpose. A great part of its attraction, is that it is a concise, readable and generalized reference text for the XML language, on par with other well known referenes for other languages, such as Lippman's C++ Primer.

This book is aimed at technically sophisticated readers who want to understand XML in its purest form. The book deconstructs the XML specification line by line, expanding the spec's terse 32 pages into a complete exposition, with examples and background information that provide useful context for XML's features and design. The only thing missing is an appendix with the full (unannotated) spec so that you could read straight through it, however, since the spec is readily available at the W3C web site, this is a very minor nit.

To really understand what XML is all about, there is no better source than the specification, and DuCharme does a great job illuminating it. Highly recommended.

I know this book is touted as the second book one should buy to discover XML, but I found Bob's explanations excellent for understanding how and why this standard was created.

In the preface, Goldfarb describes the XML Recommendation document as being expressed in "rigorous, elegant (in the mathematical sense...), formal, and concise language." The same can be said for this book's style of writing. What could have been a very nerdy examination of the technical language used in a W3C document, is more literate and even includes passages from Eliot's "The Waste Land."

The author and publisher have found a new and extremely useful format. The detailed explanation of the specification and the thinking behind the specification provide the best means I have seen to gain a deeper understanding of the XML - and to spot the fiddly details. The examples are clear and make the meaning of the formal specification clear.

Probably not the first book to read on XML unless you have some background, but a must as the second book to understand what it is really all about. Belongs on everybody's shelf who has to teach or work with XML.

Goldfarb and Prentice Hall should be encouraged to bring out other books in the same format for other parts of the growing web standards such as XSL, RDF and XData when they are final.

This book is an example of disorganizaiton. I am learning XML, and this book have given me hard time underestanding what is it all about. for example, it talks about stuff in chapter 2 that won't be discussed until chapter 4, so you won't be able to underestand anything since all chapters of the book follow the same rythm. In addition to that, there was no comprehensive examples that will help giving more or better underestanding. Bad Bad XML book.

I really doubt that Bob knows anything about XML. Bob does not explain how to construct XML document, nor how to put it into reality. Just like when you go to a Swapmeet, the man keep telling you this is a good stuff, but he just can not tell you why it's good. A lot of professors are just like that, they really know how to talk, but don't know how to explain. Don't buy this book, I am planning to return it to Amazon. The more you read this, the more you confused about XML ....