Customer Reviews

XSLT Quickly

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book, as the author himself put it, provides "task-oriented explanations of how to get work done with XSLT". I would define the audience that will benefit most as intermediate XSLT developers - you are expected to have some knowledge of XML and XSLT. Part 1 has a brief tutorial, yet too brief for a complete novice. Part 2 is what makes this book worth reading - it delves into typical tasks XSLT developers encounter: adding, changing, deleting elements and attributes, sorting, avoiding duplicates and many other. Perhaps, the book was planned as a "cookbook" to quickly look up "how do I...", but it is more than that: the author describes how things work in detail, shows the best way to perform a task, warns about subtle issues you would spend hours fighting with on your own. I found the explanations very useful: even reading about basic concepts can bring discoveries. There are more advanced topics too, like dealing with namespaces or recursive techniques; read about them, and more challenging tasks will not catch you unprepared.

The book doesn't touch on really advanced concepts like the famous Muenchian grouping, but this is probably outside of XSLT's everyday repertoire and, therefore, outside of this book's mission.

I found myself referring to this book often in JavaRanch's XML forum. Just recently when solving RSS namespace mystery, I posted a part of the stylesheet that prints namespaces (p.99) and here is the response: "That diagnostic transform is worth its weight in gold!"

And I am neither the author nor a member of his family.

XSLT is not an easy language to learn - mostly because it is close to Lisp rather than to well-known string processing languages like Perl.

XSLT QUICKLY covers XPath, XML elements and attributes manipulation, programming issues like named templates (a.k.a. functions), variables, parameters, XSLT-specific constructs like key lookups, number and string manipulation.

Readers will find _good_ ways to generate HTML, other markup and plain text from XML documents.

I think this book is a must for software developers who want to write and test robust portable XSLT scripts.

Simple, understandable and informative sample code is a true challenge for any computer book. I really appreciate samples from XSLT QUICKLY, they are easy for recycling in real-life applications. Also, like Oracle code samples, they are convenient to communicate development issues.

Last, but not least, just in the preface we find an important clarification of XML/DTD/XSLT relationship, so readers will avoid a good deal of painful confusion.

The books title sums it up. Need to do XSLT now? Go to chapter one, page 8 and you are up and running. This book is for the individual that has to code with a deadline. The pace of the book is perfect. An example is given that is straight forward, clear and explained throughly. Then on to the next example which will introduce another XSLT template with another explaination. Fortunately, the author, Mr. DuCharme, rarely spends time on obsecure points or has long discussions on advanced topics that only guru types care about. If you are just getting started,or you are an intermediate user, this is the one. Get it - Quickly.

This is a great book. It hurts to see some people reveiew it with such real... venomous dislike. I suspect it's a style thing--if you're looking for a dictionary-like exhaustive reference, maybe this book isn't for you. Having said that, I have a low tolerance for lots of verbiage, yet DuCharme's book was totally clear to me. I can poke around in it and find what I want so easily. It is very well organized, and well indexed. It serves as an excellent overview of XSLT, and gets pretty advanced, too. This is a great book.

I lached upon Bob Ducharme's XSLT Quickly after thumbing through several of the other, thicker tomes on the subject in my local bookstore. I needed a clear and concise guidebook that stepped me through the basics, and that is just what I got-- over a single weekend reading. Since then I have been reading other work by Mr. Ducharme available on the net, and I continue to be impressed with the breath, volume and clarity of his writing. While having a background in programming always helps in dealing with new technical concepts, I think this book is probably the best one for beginners and old pros alike.

I was faced with a very short deadline for transforming an XML document into another XML document with a completely different format. I went through several web tutorials and was also trying to learn from Michael Kay's "XSLT" but I was struggling to get productive. With XSLT Quickly I finally started to understand XSLT and did successfully meet my deadline. I find Bob Ducharme's explanations much clearer and easier to understand than any other book on XSLT. If you need to get productive quickly, buy this book.

Once you feel comfortable with XSLT, use Michael Kay's book for reference and advanced topics.

XSLT Quickly is the rare technical book that is valuable in a range of contexts. In addition to providing a gentle, concise introduction to XSLT for the novice, the book is a real find for skilled, working developers who can (and must) absorb paradigms and languages quickly. As a reference, it has saved me considerable time by often providing an index entry that corresponded directly to the question I had formulated. If every book on my shelf were this useable I'd have fewer shelves.

This book was perfect for me. I had been doing very basic transformations, and about all I understood was using templates and outputting values. Every time I tried to perform logic or anything more advanced, it was always hit and miss - very frustrating.

This book organizes things very well, making it easy to find what you're after. It also does a great job of cross-referencing things - telling you where to find more information about things in context. It makes it almost like bouncing around a website, which seems appropriate.

Using just this book, I am now able to do a huge number of things with XSLT.

I've just sent several months working my way through Bob Ducharme's Xslt Quickly, referred to here as XQ. It took me a little while as I can be a little dense. So can Xslt. This book, however, does a very good job of explaining fairly carefully, with real world examples, the basics of Xslt.

While my background is in programming, however i work as a tech writer, Xslt programming was different from what i had seen in the past, and to be honest, i had my doubts about this language and its use with xml at all.

It took me a couple of times to get my mind around xslt but suffice it to say that now i am hooked. XQ presents introductory material as well as features of the language/programming in good sized chunks. The sections are designed so that the reader can skip around if they want to, as well as a straight read. I had purchased an e-book version of the book when i thought i could no longer find my hard copy. (I of course found the hard copy version shortly thereafter.) This worked out well, as i felt much better making notes in the printed out version of the e-book. This is a good option to have.
I feel that XQ has whetted my appetite to learn more about XSLT, while giving me a good foundation on which to work from.
I think XQ can teach you some, simple, yet very powerful idioms within Xslt that you can use immediately. The writing is not dense or boring, yet it is pretty comprehensive. I would certainly recommend this!


Russ Urquhart

This book is, as promised, oriented toward learning and using XSLT _quickly_. I found the examples to be very helpful in getting me using XSLT with minimum effort, rather than having to learn every last detail first (although the details are in there if you need them.) Great book!