Xslt Quickly [Import] [Paperback]

Bob DuCharme (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Manning (July 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930220111
• ISBN-13: 978-1930220119
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,655,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite XSLT books, May 19, 2003

By 

Margarita Isayeva (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: XSLT Quickly (Paperback)

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent tutorial for XSLT developers, August 9, 2001

By 

"michael_maron" (Stamford, CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: XSLT Quickly (Paperback)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beginner through intermediate, November 8, 2002

By 

james wallis "Big Dog" (imperial, mo USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: XSLT Quickly (Paperback)

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.