Customer Reviews

XML Black Book 2nd Edition: The Complete Reference for XML Designers and Content Developers

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

 

 

If you want to get confused about understanding XML...this is the book you should be looking for. It is a waste of time and money for those who wants to understand XML. The book doesn't explain any fundamental concepts (of elements, attributes, entities, etc) and instead make the subject complex by poor style of it's writing. If it were not my company's book, I would have torn it and thrown straight into the trash can...!

The book has made a very bad impression of "Black Book" series and Coriolis Publishers, in general, on me.

I want to echo another reviewer's comment that this book is excruciatingly redundant. _Elementary_ concepts get repeated page after page, until you want to scream.

Put frankly, this book is terrible. No time spent teaching anything about XML, just reasons why we should use it, repeated again and again, chapter after chapter. ... Officially, my first and last purchase of the "Black Book" series.

I own the 2nd edition and I think this book does a pretty good job of teaching the basics and intermediate XML, especially if you are coming from an experienced HTML developer, and especially if you want to know how xml parsers work with your xml document. However, I don't think it does a good job of explaning all the different mixes of XML, such as XSL and XPath... the chapters on those topics were just plain confusing and worthless. It did however explain very well how XHTML works from an XML standpoint; very clear and easy to understand. A *fair* all-around XML book.

I bought this book because of the great experiences I had with the ASP and VB Black Books. The 2nd edition of this book is no where close to the quality of the afore mentioned texts. Simple concepts are repeated over and over and over... ! It made me want to scream! Granted, I've only covered the first 9 chapters, but I can already see the authors could of cut at least 200 pages out of this book if they would have just got to the point on subjects and didn't repeat concepts all the time! Here's a favorite line of mine (from page 194), "You use one of the values of #IMPLIED, #REQUIRED, or #FIXED to indicate to the XML processor that the attribute is either implied, required, or fixed, respectively." I kid you not; this is the type of over-simplified, uninformative comments you get. And this particular concept has been covered at least 5 times in the first 9 chapters! I think the authors purposely padded this book to make it look impressive; they even included the XML spec in the appendix. I can go online for the stinkin' spec! Give me some in depth and unique takes for crying out loud! Buy this book and expect: incorrect cross references, repetition of simple concepts, descriptive statements of the obvious, lack of interesting/complex examples, disorganized thought, continuous forward references on subjects (can't you just cover the concept thoroughly when you bring it up?), and no coverage of XML schemas (what comprehensive XML text leaves this out?). This book is an extremely frustrating read and I agree with another reviewer that the authors should refund my money for the time I've wasted on it. My time is valuable, darn it! I've never written a book review before, but this book is a joke and has yet to be of help to me.

Most of these reviews are for the first edition of this book. A new edition was released just last month, and it's a big improvement over the first edition. Many of the issues broguht up by reviewers here have been addressed in the new edition. I bought the new edition and have found it to be thorough and accurate! Give it a try if you're looking for comprehensive coverage of XML.