Customer Reviews

XML: The Complete Reference

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

 

 

This book is very useful and well written. The topics covered include XML basics, DTD's, style sheets, XML schemas, XML Query, XHTML, SYMM and MIL. It describes each topic in detail and with examples. Some of the examples help understand the different error messages given by the validating parsers. Perhaps that is the part programmers are mostly interested in.

Topics like XML Query and RDF are out of date as of now (Sept 2002), due to new W3C specifications, but introduction provided in the book is still useful for getting started. I really like XML Query chapter because no other small introduction is available elsewhere as of now.

This book is an excellent choice to get started with XML. It has got all the basics and nice examples.

I found XML: The Complete Reference to be a worthy book to have in my library. You will not learn everything there is to know about XML in this book, but you will be able to understand it well enough to begin. I have used this book over and over to look up little things that need. It is sometimes dificult to find what you are looking foor. But I have put tabs in my book to help me. If you program in XML, you will use this book everyday. This is a must have!

We have been using this book as a Training manual and reference book for all of our classes in XML. It is very thorough and contains all the information anyone will need to be able to get started with XML programming. I think that MS Williamson has done a great job of putting together a lot of information in a book that can be used by people of different levels of knowledge and expertise.

We use the XML:The Complete Reference book for teaching XML. It has a wide range of information that the students can use and when it came out it covered more related topics than most books did on XML. This book is geared more for people that need an instructor or for those that can use it as a reference book for which the title implies.

I have found Ms. Williamson's XML reference book to be useful whenever I have any questions. It has been easy to find the answers and a great help.

The book XML: The Complete Reference has been of great use to me. I had taken a class on web sites and document designs, for my company, and the class used XML: The Complete Reference as a guide. I thought that Ms. Williamson did an excellant job creating a guide and reference book for XML. I use it whenever I have any questions while using XML. It has been wonderful and a great help.

Ms. Williamson has written a good text that covers the basics, but I'd hardly call it a complete reference. But what bothers me the most is that I can ALMOST NEVER find what I need in the index! And I've read the book. I end up spending way too much time thumbing through the pages to find something I know I've read. For example, where is that part on the <xsl:output> attributes? It's on page 358, but you'll never discover that from the index--unless you look under "result trees, XSLT." Give me a break.

This book describes XML thoroughly, but it really didn't help me understand XML, especially from a perspective of building applications or web sites. As a reference, I find it inappropriately titled, because it isn't structured well enough to be used as a reference (there are no easily referenced function listings, for example). It explains the XML components in detail, but the examples are small and poor and didn't work in Internet Explorer 5.5, though the text claimed they would.

The book essentially teaches you what XML is (and even how to build documents, including DTDs, XSLT, and more), but it doesn't teach you how to apply it in real world use. It doesn't even convince you why (or where) you should use XML. Most references I read tout XML as the next evolution for web design, but this book leaves me thinking XML isn't valuable for anything other than exchanging data between systems. In other words, it doesn't convince me that I should use XML to build a web site.

I'm sure there are better, less pricey books that can do a better job than this book did at teaching both what XML is and how to apply it. I'll be returning this one and giving Inside XML or the XML Bible a look, as I should have done in the first place.