Customer Reviews

The XML Handbook (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

One of the strangest books I have seen and a very disturbing trend. The authors sold corporate sponsorship of chapters and let each company write an chapter-length ad. Its bad enough to get ads at movie theaters and on rental videos, but in a technical book? It's one thing to have ads in things where the cost is largely underwritten by the ads (like magazines), but its quite another to find 25% of a full-priced book filled with ads. Buying this book will only help to standardize this practice. Send the publishing industry a message by refusing to buy this book.

As many other readers point out, this book is aimed at managers who could buy the products sold by the companies who bought chapter ads.

The reviewer who states that this book is offensive because it consists of almost 50 chapters of random advertisements, written by different "sponsors".... is absolutely right.

This book is offensive. But if you get past the first 50 chapters, and read the last 15 or so chapters, you might agree with me that they are well written. These chapters teach you the technical specifics of XML, DTD's, XSL, XPath, XPointer, XLink, and Schemas. A pretty fine introduction if you ask me. 5 stars for pages 720 thru 950. 0 stars for the rest of the book, and shame on the authors for subjecting their paying customers to such a glut of material.

I'm tempted to take a set of tree-trimmers and chop off the first 720 pages. It would be easier to carry around with me that way too.... Hmmm.....

This book includes a lot of topics but mainly at the level of marketing documents, it may be good for some high-level managers but not very useful for developers.

Sure, you won't learn how to code XML. What you will get are real-world solutions to real-world problems. If you're trying to make the case for XML in your organization, buy this book. Tutorial chapters give strong introduction to the tech specifics. The CD is packed with tools to start experimenting with. Recommended for project managers, information architects, and anyone in content management.

This XML book is heavy on bad jokes and light on examples in the early chapters. If you are looking for a solid introduction to XML please don't buy this book. Its like learning to ride a bike by building your own bike out of paper. The author enjoys including bad jokes and then making you read footnotes explaining the joke. The author also devotes many pages on the exact use of terms. Most of the time an explanation of terminology is useful, however the author convolutes each definition with his own jokes and exhaustive list of misuses that you are often more confused after reading the definition. Sometimes the author will say "This term should only be used to describe <a> and not <b,c,d> but we will still use it for <b,c,d> if the context fits. This is very confusing. Also, the author does not seem to think examples are important. The first 100 pages contain almost no examples. Often, XML concepts are illustrated with juveniles cartoon pictures and described with equally juvenile metaphors designed to be amusing instead of instructive. The author does not make it clear which concepts are essential and which elements are less important and throws them all together so you are forced to read 100 pages in order to glean 20 pages of useful material. If I was reading a book on how to ride a bike I would like to know where to put my feet and how to pedal. I don't care why the wheels shouldn't be called tires or who invented the first bicycle lock. In summary: This book has few examples in the early chapters. The content is mashed together. The content is confusing. It is filled with terrible jokes and annoying useless footnotes. This book is in DIRE need of an editor. The authors make a big deal of how they are experts in the field. Perhaps their importance in the XML field let them get away with light editing. Its a shame since the result is a terrible waste of a reference book. I would recommend the NUTSHELL series if they have one for XML. NUTSHELL books are usually concise, well edited, extremely informative, make excellent reference books, and are light on corny jokes.

Although this book isn't very comprehensive in the turtorial part, it provides very solid foundations on the XML theories and practices. I've read other XML books and still bought this book. It seems to me that this book is more oriented to the management level, however, it's always good to "think" and "analyze" more and not just blindly code (or copy). To gain the expert's insight alone is worth the price. And the chapter on teaching how to read the XML specifications is really helpful.

The XML handbook starts out as an interesting and extremely well written book. It gives excellent background and presents the history and philosophy of XML in a fine and interesting manner - almost as good as a novel! Suddenly, it drops you and goes from page 110 - 720 describing products for you to buy that you have not even been presented a background for yet. The at page 720 the book starts again. This 990 page book ends up with 380 pages of book and 610 pages of commercials! This is preposterous! It's also a shame that what could and should have been a fine book sold itself cheaply - and expects the customer to pay the price. I'm sad for the authors.

This is not the book to learn XML from, but it is an excellent introduction to its uses. It's a good first volume for marketers, product managers and other IT professionals who want to understand how XML might impact their work. The sponsored chapters provide valuable case studies, and set XML in context within the computing landscape.

A few years ago, I bought Dr Goldfarb's great "SGML Handbook". I thought "The XML Handbook" would be something similar.

The book contains, roughly, 100 pages of introduction to XML; 250 pages of tutorials on XML and its subcultures; and almost 600 pages of corporate presentations, of varying quality, on various aspects of XML application and implementation.

The introduction and tutorials, although good, didn't have the depth I was looking for.

The corporate bit addresses a very broad range of interesting issues, with varying levels of detail, but never enough to "solve the problem".

So for me, the signal-to-noise ratio was pretty low.

Let me give an example of a major gap in the book's coverage: I had hoped to gain much more insight into the relative merits of using attributes as against using element content; but I finished the book no wiser than when I started (other than having seen some examples where I disagreed with the approach taken).

The CD-ROMs didn't add much value, either: the web has moved on very rapidly.

To add to my disappointment, the production of the book is not of a high standard.

- The rendering of low-level headings leaves a lot to be desired (Ex: I looked at 33.2.2.6.4 on page 480 for fully 30 seconds before understanding that it was a heading). So does that of block quotes, which appear to run on to the following paragraph.

- Many footnotes on a left-hand page with callouts on the previous page make reading a chore (Ex: fn #2 on pp 59 and 60). There is a general disdain for any attempt to keep figures on the same left-right page pair as their references.

- It might have been less irritating, too, to use a single numbering space for all Figures, Examples, Tables, and Spec Excerpts, rather than obliging the reader to work out the sometimes subtle difference between "Example 8-1" and "Figure 8-1".

This book, I understand from the Preface, was itself prepared using XML. Unfortunately, good markup for publishing is of little use without excellent rendering. I got a strong impression of unseemly haste to get the book out before getting the rendering up to scratch. So readability was badly crippled (unlike The SGML Handbook).

One last damn. So far, I've read the book just once. Although I'm kind to books, the cover is already dog-eared and de-laminating. It probably doesn't matter, because, in contrast to "The SGML Handbook", reading this book a second time won't add anything. That's another reason I think it wrong to call it a Handbook.

More in sorrow than in anger, then: two stars for Dr. Goldfarb, zero for Prentice-Hall.

There are far better books, that cost less, are more concise and
reveal a lot more about XML and the impact it is starting to have on
society. If you are a programmer seeking a technical guide, this is
not for you either.