Customer Reviews

The Xml Companion

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

 

 

All reference books should be this short. The XML Companion is generally clear and concise and does a nice job of relating XML to its cousins SGML and HTML. The examples are easy to follow, although the diagrams are often messy--too many arrows pointing this way and that, obscuring parts of the drawing. The charts, tables, and glossary are extremely handy.

Unfortunately, two chapters (XLL and XSL) are based on specifications that haven't even become official W3C recommendations yet--why waste the paper and ink on something you know will be outdated by the time the book appears in print? Apparently some marketing bozo at Addison-Wesley decided this was the way to go.

Worse, despite its helpful content, every chapter of this book is riddled with typos and other lapses in copyediting and proofreading, which is an embarrassment to the author and a disgrace to the publisher. One expects better of Addison-Wesley--or at least I used to. The proofreader of this book should be whipped, and the project manager should be fired.

Bradley's book is a pretty complete guide to XML and related technologies. The main chapters are almost tutorial in style, with plenty of code examples to follow. The end of the book contains a small reference section. The topics covered are XML, XSL, XSLT, DOM, SAX, XPath, Schemas, XLink, XHTML, and CSS. Discussions are for the most part clear and accurate. I have two main complaints about Bradley. First, the prose, while accurate, is often overly verbose. It could be written more concisely and compactly. Second, each chapter is broken into sections, but the sections are not numbered, so it is difficult to locate material in the text. The main advantage is the comprehensive general coverage of XML-related technologies. Buying this one book will arm you with the knowledge to develop XML applications and content, and it will save you money. If you have very specific needs, you may need to supplement Bradley with another more focused text that delves deeper into a particular technology. Also, if you want to see longer applications presented as case studies, you might want a different text. I recommend this book for beginning and intermediate XML users who want broad, general coverage in a single book.

This book is clearly not for a beginner, nor should it be. Many reviews give it less than five stars due to the fact that it's a bad tutorial. Well it wasn't designed as one, as you should see in the title XML **Companion**. It's designed as a thorough reference of XML and related technologies. Neil is really up to date with his stuff. I couldn't find another book, (and I've skimmed through all of them), that covers everything. Coverage of technical issues like white space normalization, Relax, Trex, Relax NG, etc... It's wondeful.
Please don't buy this book as a tutorial, but rather as a desktop reference. It's a must on all XML programmer's bookshelves.

This book comes right to the point on what you need to write XML. No fluff, no hype, just straight talk about what you need to know to create DTDs and write XML documents. The author also discusses XLink, XPointer, XSL, and XSLT. This is not a book for beginners. However, if you are very familiar with other mark up languages, you should have no problem with this book.

This book gets right to the meat of XML without going through long drawn out discussion of history. It has a very good overview on parsing XML, with good examples. The book also addresses other issues that I don't often see in other XML books: translation of logical models to DTD's, and document management - although I felt like I was left hanging. The discussion of XSL is based on an older draft version of the standard.

1. Depth and breadth of topics being covered with real application make this a solid reference for XML applications, such as Apache Cocoon 1 & 2 Frameworks. Java is indeed a natural companion to XML.

2. It is not a cookbook of raw XML/XSLT/CSS/XSchema/XLink/XInclude/XPointer, etc... It actually explains the Design behind the implementation leaving one to approach implementation with foresight and focus on planning before one wastes needless hours of frustration during rushed implementations.

3. It is for someone with a solid understanding of MVC (Model/View/Controller) abstraction approaches that are pervasive in OOA/OOD that includes Smalltalk, Objective-C, Java, C++, C#, Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc...

4. It describes XML as a means to be both a boon for turning publishing into an Art of Reuse as well as how XML solidifies many failed attempts of standards that were not able to become language agnostic. XML and all her siblings are that meta bridge.

5. With the XSL Companion those who complained about it being either difficult to grasp or tediously complex will be vindicated and appreciate returning to this book to explain all the questions that surface along the way during any project they become involved in helping solve.

6. Neil is very honest that this book is about wrapping your head around the XML paradigm and not about being a Dictionary of answers to all your XML application(s) needs. It should become clear the reason behind so many XML application standards. There are just so many avenues to address how could they all possibly be expressed in just one book?

I really liked this book; it starts with what you know (HTML) and works toward this new thing, XML. It even discusses SGML vs. XML, and how they might merge.

It isn't full of the bizarre examples I've seen elsewhere; most of the examples are related to familiar typesetting issues. Apparently, the book itself is written in XML and the DTD is provided in an appendix.

Other examples concern transforming database information into XML.

Finally, there is some useful (if slightly out-of-date) information on parsing XML, including using the Java SAX parser.

Basically, this is an XML book done right. It could have more detail in some areas ... but it could also be too big to carry around. I recommend it.

A good short book that covered the stuff I wanted to know without using the large type and pictures other series seem to need to make their books thicker. Useful examples and not fixated on using xml as a replacement for html or only for text "publishing" applications.

This is the book to read if you want to understand what XML is and why you should be interested in it.

Having looked at most XML books currently on the market, I like this one best because (1) it is short (2) it is authoritative (3) it is reasonably current (4) it talks about XML *and* all the related standards/proposals (XSL, XSLT, XPointer, XLink, etc) (5) it gives you the big picture and the details, but it never gets lost in the details.

*After* you read this book, you go ahead and buy a programming book for whatever platform you happen to be working on.

It is a common misunderstanding that introductory computer books have to be 1000+ pages long, must contain 50% code, and have to be written to the lowest common denominator. This book does not fall in this category; it is written for grown ups.

To summarize, this is the kind of book that usually gets published under the O'Reilly label.

I loved this book. I've got about eight or ten XML books, but this is the one I turn to for my "Why?" questions.

It's not a tutorial or cookbook, but it explains XML logically and historically. I don't sit down at my computer with this book ready to type in stuff. This is the book that I sit down with in my comfortable armchair ready to understand XML in a way that makes sense and sticks with me. It's very readable.