Customer Reviews

XML Schema: The W3C's Object-Oriented Descriptions for XML

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

 

 

This book had potential to be a definitive guide to XML schema. This is not the kind of book you can pick up and read cover to cover (unless insomnia is a real condition for you, in which case this book may help). It is, by no means, a tutorial of XML schema - or even a reference. It's more of an exploratory academic walk of the W3C recommendation and all of its foibles and nuances. There is wealth of information in this book, if you can glean it out from inbetween the droning prose and historical diatribe.

O'Reilly should be shamefully embarassed for ever letting this book go to print in the condition it is. It is replete with errata, typos, and slopped together examples. This book is destined to frustrate those new to XML schema. An uncharacteristicly poor level of quality for O'Reilly.

Having recently read "Definitive XML Schema" by Priscilla Walmsley I thought I'd learned all I needed to know about XML Schema. That book is more tutorial in tone and content, while this one quickly dispenses with the background material and gets into the technical details. In fact, by chapter 2 you're already developing a schema and the subsequent chapters drill deeper into the mechanics of XML Schema.

I like the way each facet, factor and detail of XML schema is covered, including clear descriptions of data types, a direct linkage to XML-based databases, and all of the building blocks along the way. More importantly, the author provides multiple approaches to developing schemas, and sufficiently covers the syntactical requirements and specifications to allow you to become proficient in creating them for real applications.

The book is fast-paced and you will need to be familiar with XML and its related vocabularies in order to follow this book. If you need a more introductory, tutorial-based book get "Definitive XML Schema" by Priscilla Walmsley. However, if you understand the fundamentals of relational databases, are currently developing DTDs and understand XML, this book is better suited to your experience level and is the one I recommend.

Let's face it; the XML Schema recommendations are complex, academic and often arcane. The book attempt to provide a quite in depth coverage within a limited amount of pages, the result is a solid amount of info, but definitely a dry reading, not practical oriented, almost academic. The author assume a good understanding of XML and its related technologies, it's a useful, detailed book, but beginners should definitely look elesewhere

This book appears to have been thrown together overnight, without the attention of a proofreader or content editor. While I can't say it's actually missing important content, it is certainly the sloppiest O'Reilly book I've ever read. The very first example (on p. 6) is a glaringly ill-formed XML document (the second line contains spurious junk text, as if from a word-processing error), and it just continues from there. The book contains numerous apparent "cut-and-paste" errors of this kind, as well as evidence that global search-and-replace operations were hastily performed on the entire text without subsequent proofreading. What's up, O'Reilly?

This book is very dry and terse. It has all of the required content but it doesn't provide much perspective of how it should be used. You could use it as a reference, but I recommend the XML Schema Companion before this one.

This book tells you what you need to know. However, it is a bit of a hard slog because it doesn't tell you why you need to know it. It also throws in obscure acronyms and not only expects you to know what they stand for, but what those protocols/standards/programs imply. Yes, you can learn all you need to know about SQL schema, (and more than you need to know - without telling you why you need to know it, you don't know what to skip), but it is a little more painful than it has to be.

This book tries to cover far too much in too little space, much of which is taken up by examples that are not that great and lack any type of highlighting, arrows, boxes, etc. that would help you quickly find the relevant pieces.

Regardless of whether the author had a page limit or simply favors a terse and academic style, the net result was that I had to seek other sources to understand numerous points, and they universally explained the topic much more logically and in an easy to follow and, more importantly, read fashion.

All in all a very painful read.

A real need for further editions on this book. As others have commented, it's very poorly constructed, poorly indexed and you'll be hard-pressed to quickly find accurate definitions. As other posters have suggested, O'Reilly should be worried that this one got published in this state.

Mr Van Der Vlist explaines XML schema in a very clear way, and the book is pretty short and easy to read. He does not explain XML, so you should better understand it before buying this book.

XML Schema is used almost everywhere (in connection with XML documents, Web Services, SOAP etc.). So I as other people needed to master XML Schema. There is not a great choice of XML Schema books. Specification is already quite getting old. The book is not easy to read. I read it sequentially chapter after chapter and I mastered a lot of basic rules. The main problem now I see is, XML Schema itself does not give you too much of design freedom. Sometimes you need to define a structure (data type) according value of other elements. So now I know mainly what is not possible to do in XML Schema.
After all I have to recommend the book. You have to read it twice. So I have just bought another XML Schema book from Priscilla and I hope I will get to know XML Schema from other point of view.