Customer Reviews

Xml: A Primer

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

It's not very often that you find a book that lines up with your level of experience and curiousity, but this Primer was a perfect match for me. As a webmaster with 5 years of scripting and markup experience, I appreciated that this book didn't waste any time with HTML. It is an excellent entry point to XML - I couldn't imagine there being a better one out there. It answers "what is XML?" and "how can I use it?" and gets immediately to these points. The author very effectively uses the book itself as an example of what an XML document looks like - i.e. he goes back and scripts an actual chapter in markup. It is very well written (I read 150 pages in one sitting two weeks ago.) Some people might complain that there is too much focus on creating documents and not enough detail about enabling e-commerce, but I think this aproach is necessary. I have since purchased other more detailed books on the particular facets of XML that I'm going to implement for e-commerce, but I wouldn't have gotten here so quickly if it wasn't for this primer. Very highly recommended if you are a webmaster and you don't need the HTTP and HTML background & want to jump directly into XML.

I think my title says it all. This book was very helpful to me and it should be for anyone looking for an introduction and a little history on XML. It starts out very basic though, and moves sloooowly up the knowlege ladder. I was tired of it quickly and found myself skipping chapters to get 'just the facts please'. If you know nothing about XML and need an intro, you may want this book but I would look around for others as well. This lacks hard-core examples.

It's February 2001, and this book still does a better job of explaining what XML is all about than ones with a 2001 copyright date. St. Laurent's understanding of a Primer is right on target. Instead of having tons of code for the reader to cluelessly hammer out, he explains how XML works, and so when the reader does code the examples, he understands far better what's going on. The explanation of the Document Object Model is unmatched in any of the other books published on XML. Likewise, the crucial topic of Document Type Definitions (DTD) is handled far better and in intelligent detail than anything published since.

Unfortunately, XML is deceptively complex. While it doesn't take a rocket scientist to crank up an XML file, toss in some CSS and claim XML is yet another programming language one has conquered, understanding how the DTD works requires more than a couple of examples and a reassuring pat on the shoulder that the reader can do it in an afternoon. What St. Laurent does, and does well, is to prepare the serious developer/programmer for understanding XML. To be sure, the book represents a foundation for using XML and is not an entire treatise on all that XML can do. However, unlike some of the books I've seen on XML that contain code that will not validate (including on their CD ROMs), this book gets it right. If you want to get XML right, this book is the place to start.

Pros: Provides XML at a beginner's level concisely. Good examples. Excellent references to web resources (brave guy - writes URLs with real ink)

Cons: Typesetting/composition confusing and tiring. Needs a better font, more white space, code examples spanning fewer pages & set in a fixed-width font.

Could be better organized. Lacks reference resources (but references to the web may be a better use of reader time.) Will suffer the obsolesence common to all books written about draft standards.

Conclusion: It's probably the best commercial book yet available (5/98) - well worth the relatively inexpensive price.

I'm an experienced programmer, with a few months experience doing intranet development with HTML and Cold Fusion. I was looking for an intro to XML that focused on the rationale, the architecture, etc. (ie - not a how-to tutorial). This book fits that bill. However, I found the writing style to be dense and difficult to follow. For me, it was sleep-inducing. I found the examples to be too few and not well explained.

I have read other books on XML but found them to be too advanced, expecting you to already know a great deal about SGML and about Java, which most parsers are written in. But St. Laurent starts you off at the beginning, going step by step through building a DTD and an ordinary document, explaining the purposes of each and giving you rules you can look back to to make sure you are doing this properly. It is the best transition from HTML to XML I have seen so far.

This book is filled with too many code snippets and references to HTML and SGML. I found myself constantly skipping pages in an attempt to get to any valuable information about XML.

My problem isn't so much with the content (which does tend to get ahead of itself in places... using terms that haven't been fully explained beyond expanding the acronym) as it is with the presentation. I'm sure MISpress was in a hurry to catch the popular wave of the XML tide, but this is really sloppy. The margins are off and awkward. This may have been forgivable until I found an entire page (pg 54 in my copy) containing the data from the previous page. Whatever was supposed to appear on that page got lost somewhere in this print run, but I didn't pull this information off of a website (where it might be forgivable)... I paid for it.

I first read this book a few years ago, and still read excerpts from it periodically as friends get involved. In one of the early chapters, St Laurent basically asserts that WYSIWYG was actually a technological setback. I knew at that point I was going to enjoy the book.

If you're into computer science, and want to understand the technology - this is a great place to start.

This is one of the few techno books I've read that is actually enjoyable as well as informative. It may be a little light in some areas (e.g. XSL and XML schemas instead of DTDs) but these can be gotten from other sources.