Customer Reviews

XSLT Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for XML and XSLT Developers, 2nd Edition

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Some other reviews have said that this is not a book for beginners, which is true. You need to understand the mechanics of XSLT first to get the most out of the book. That's not the real value, however. This book is great because it shows you how to write XSLT well. This is a value that a simple reference will not provide.

The book is an excellent practical hands-on reference for
creating solutions in the XML-XSL Transformation domain.

It covers areas from simple string operations to SVG generation
to extending XSLT with Perl, JavaScript and Java.

The author Sal Mangano has good working examples with detailed
descriptions of the code. This makes experimenting with new
code relatively painless.

Being an experienced XSLT developer I found the book easy to
follow. However people new to the concept of XML transformations
would do well to get a basic understanding of the matter before
diving into building solutions using this book.

Having a copy of the XSLT Cookbook during the development
phase of the LCRA.org website project would have reduced the
time needed to craft a good sustainable solution, and reduced
the amount of code I had to redesign to be modular and flexible.

An example is the recommendation : "Prefer 'selecting' and
'matching' over 'filtering'" pg 114, para 3. This allows for
flexible XML schemas.

A companion CD with working example code and a searchable
text of the book on the CD would have been appreciated.
The website at Oreilly does have a downloadable zip file
of the examples.

All in all well worth the $40.00 price of the book,

Neeraj

The XSLT Cookbook offers more than one hundred code solutions to common XSLT problems. The covered topics range from string operations, handling dates and numbers to converting xml to various formats, like text, HTML or SVG.
The author also included some speciality solutions for working with Visio and Excel documents or generating XTM Topic Maps. The last chapters of the book cover some more advanced topic, like extending XSLT and testing stylesheets.
As it is a Cookbook, the beef of this book are the code examples. All examples I tested so far are of outstanding quality and work great. For the most problems you will encounter when writing stylesheets, this book offers an example. Just look it up and you are there.
The very high quality of this book and it's code examples is impressive. The author Sal Mangano sure put a lot of work and research into this book. And the expertise of Jeni Tennison, as technical reviewer, and Simon St.Laurent, as editor, sure were an important factor in achieving this quality standard.

If you are an absolute beginner, you probably should start with a more tutorial style book, but as soon as you have some basic knowledge of XSLT, this book is a great reference for XSLT solutions.

Summary: Excellent Examples but Limited Use for Beginners

I'm half-way through the "XSLT Cookbook" and I must say I like this author's style. Compared to my level, Sal Mangano is a master at writing style-sheets; however, I never feel as though he is writing down to me. While most of the book is composed of cut-and-dry material, Mr. Mangano also provides just enough (but no more) interesting and slightly humorous ideas to prevent distraction.

The examples are pretty useful on their own for the programmer who is just learning the language), and they also prompted some stimulating ideas for my own projects. I especially find the chapters "Extending and Embedding XSLT" and "XML to XML" helpful (although the example in section 12.6 seems incomplete with no include statements). I would have preferred a little more details on embedding Saxon in Java, but the references provided (and the sample chapter of "Java and XSLT" from O'Reilly's web site) more than enough details to get me started.

Even though there are several highlights of the book, the solutions presented are a little hard to figure out (since, as a beginner, I don't yet read the Extensible Style sheet Language fluently) so a second book or tutorial is recommended for those who are generally unfamiliar with or unconfident using XSLT and XPath. The second edition should definitely have a **brief** reference or tutorial for 'us' beginners. In chapter two, he also mentions discussing trig functions, but Mr. Mangano only gives one sentence and no examples for their XSLT solutions. Although I can guess at their implementation (using a series that I constantly use in my Complex Analysis class), I wish the author would still have included such an example.

Despite these flaws, I highly recommend Sal Mangano's manuscript as an addition for anyone who is learning XSLT or just wants a quick solution to a common problem.

[Review of 2nd edition]

One of my favorite development methodologies is "R&D"... "Rob & Duplicate". And an important source of inspiration is often the O'Reilly Cookbook series. For XSLT, you now have an up-to-date wealth of samples to pull from... XSLT Cookbook (2nd Edition) by Sal Mangano.

Contents: XPath; Strings; Numbers and Math; Dates and Times; Selecting and Traversing; Exploiting XSLT 2.0; XML to Text; XML to XML; Querying XML; XML to HTML; XML to SVG; Code Generation; Vertical XSLT Application Recipes; Extending and Embedding XSLT; Testing and Debugging; Generic and Functional Programming; Index

If you've never seen an O'Reilly Cookbook, the concept is pretty simple. Each "recipe" consists of a problem description, a solution, and a discussion of how the solution addresses the issues, along with any observations that can shed light on the situation. These recipes are then grouped together by general problem types so that you can easily find an area that might offer up a quick answer to your particular problem. In this book, Mangano expands upon the 1st edition that covered XSLT 1.0. The 2nd edition now covers the updated XSLT 2.0 standard, and offers up both 1.0 and 2.0 solutions and discussions to many of the problems. As such, you will find value in the material regardless of your particular version usage. So for instance, let's say I have an XML file that needs to be reformatted into a second file to meet some formatting requirement. By checking into the XML to XML file, I'll find solutions on turning attributes into elements, elements to attributes, renaming elements and attributes, and so on. Tutorial books will teach you the syntax for doing stuff like this, but they can't anticipate real-world solutions. Cookbooks assume you already know what you're doing, and they go right to solutions.

Personally, I find a number of uses for books like this. There's the obvious, which is to find an exact (or nearly so) answer to your particular problem. But stepping away from the "immediate" need, there's always the opportunity to read through the recipes and see how others might code a solution. You can learn new coding techniques that way, as well as see features of the language that perhaps you never noticed before. Sort of like having a guru sitting next to you at work...

Assuming you're past the point of beginner, the XSLT Cookbook is probably the second XSLT book that you want to have on your bookshelf. If it helps you solve a couple of problems and save a handful of hours in the process, it'll more than pay for itself...

I own both the XSLT Programmers Reference by M. Kay and XSLT by D. Tidwell. Both these books helped me learn XSLT; however, I am quite sure Mangano's book will help me master it. To be fair, I have only read the SVG chapter in detail but it provided such a treasure trove of immediately useful solutions that it alone was worth the price of the book. Sal Mangano writes in a no nonsense style that gets to the heart of what an XSLT user needs to know to get immediate results. However, far from just providing a grab bag of reusable code snippets, the XSLT Cookbook provides welcome insight in how to structure XSLT transformations.

My only complaint is that the code for the book was not yet available at the O'Reilly web site. However, as the book was just recently published I am hopeful it will be posted soon.

XSLT Cookbook presents specific solutions to situations you come across when using XSLT. While the book can help solve an immediate problem it can also be used as an intermediate or advanced level text to get a better understanding of XSLT and how to write stylesheets.

There are fourteen chapters dealing with topics such as Strings, Dates and Numbers, Selecting and Traversing, XML to HTML, Code Generation, and Testing and Debugging. Each problem has a short problem statement, a solution, and a discussion of the solution. The solution discussions often describe alternates and why they were not selected as the preferred solution.

I have not read the entire book yet but picked chapters that were of interest to me. The Selecting and Traversing and Testing and Debugging chapters contain approaches I could use right away. The Generic and Functional Programming chapter was very interesting and I wish this book had been available in mid-2002 when I was doing code generation work with XSLT. Good stuff in every chapter I have read!

This is a book that most, if not all, XSLT developers should have. For beginners it provides concrete examples of how to use XSLT. For more advanced developers it provides a good reference for solving that problem you are trying to solve.

This book is invaluable as an adjunct to some of the reference works, such as O'Reilly's XSLT book. This book provides practical examples of how to solve common problems you face when you develop with XSLT. The chapters on querying and selecting and traversing are worth the price alone.

The outlook of this "XSLT Cookbook" is refined: giving luxurious accommodation to experts, without scaring beginners away. Most of its 450 pages were dedicated to a sensible problem-solution-discussion pattern, (which readers should appreciate).
Apart from analyzing how to manipulate XML documents with Stylesheets, elaborate methods of using SVG and XSLT to plot graphs and charts were stressed. The otherwise tricky art of creating SOAP documentations from WSDL (using XSLT) was reduced to nursery rhymes.
I am satisfied by this author's method of tackling XSLT problems. Still, when the next edition of this book appears, I would expect to see a better job done: as regards all those precursors, which facilitate the processing of Visio documents in XSLT.
In conclusion, I would say that this is one of the few eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations books, which did not discriminate between beginners and advanced learners. All are welcomed! A great value indeed!

XSLT is one of those technologies that has been around for awhile, but it feels like not enough great references are out there for developers. When this is the case for any technology, any new guide that comes out is a breath of fresh air, because it might be the right tool to turn a regular developer into a SUPER developer. With 'XSLT Cookbook' by Sal Mangano, XML and XSLT programmers finally have a guide that they can really sink their teeth into, with real solutions to everyday problems. Jam packed with over 700 pages of material, this book covers the major important topics that one would expect to read up on: string manipulation, math processing, date/time handling, XML conversions to plain text, querying XML documents with XSLT... the list goes on and on.

If you use XSLT on a regular basis or you have a project that is going to use XSLT and/or XML, you will be hard-pressed to find a better reference out there on the market today for your needs and this text will no doubt present either the solution you are exactly looking for, or provide a basis for achieving the desired solution you are aiming to find.

***** HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECCOMENDATION