XSL Companion, The (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

One of the most important technologies on the XML bandwagon is XSL, which really comprises separate XSL, XSLT, and Xpath standards. The XSL Companion provides in-depth coverage of XSL and XSLT--the core technologies behind the formatting of XML data.

This book focuses on the details of how XSLT in particular can be used to mold information on the fly. The author breaks the standard apart into digestible chapters that cover, say, "contextual formatting" and "sorting." The content is fast moving and demands a technical reader who is comfortable with complexity. Those who are new to XML technologies should pick up a general tutorial prior to tackling this book.

Along with text explanations of all of the magic that XSLT and XSL can do, the author uses code snippets and numerous graphical diagrams to illustrate information processing, layout, and tree navigation. These visual elements add much to the explanation of what otherwise would be abstract concepts indeed.

The author addresses head-on the fact that much of XSLT's job today is to turn XML data into HTML-formatted documents that are compatible with the current batch of browsers. There is plenty of focus in this book on how that is done, but the chief purpose remains the exploration of the powerful transformation and formatting features that the XSL standards provide. --Stephen W. Plain

Product Description

A concise, comprehensive and accessible guide to the scope, strengths and limitations of the XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) family of stylesheet standards for XML, this book explains the practical ways in which XSL can be utilized for formatting and manipulating information held in the hugely popular XML data format If you are a current or potential XML user looking for just one reference to get you up to speed on styling and manipulating your XML documents with clarity, comprehensive coverage and precision, then this book will be your essential and constant companion

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Education; 1st edition (September 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201674874
• ISBN-13: 978-0201674873
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #398,580 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best XSLT Reference Available, January 8, 2001

By	Brent Foust (California) - See all my reviews

This is an excellent way to learn XSLT. The progression of chapters makes it both easy and exciting to read, in anticipation of learning about even more of XSLT's features.

The book is well written, but there are at least a couple of typos in the examples. The description is generally clear enough that there will generally be no confusion (such as the ending "</xsl:test> tag on page 132, instead of "</xsl:if>" -- although the <if> tag typo on page 127 causes more confusion).

Filters, XPath expressions, and using named templates as subroutines are covered well, and many other useful tidbits are given, such as how to output in HTML format (no closing tags), passing comments through to the output file, and suppressing the output of unnecessary namespace declarations. Calling Java methods from XSLT is also covered.

I especially liked the explanation of how to reorganize input into a completely different order in the output, as well as how to insert content from other XML files.

The formatting language called "XSL" is also covered in detail in the last half of the book, if you have a need to learn it. Hopefully, browsers begin to support it soon.

The only material that I wanted to see covered that wasn't is how to perform arithmetic expressions (multiplication, division, and modulus, for example, although addition and subtraction are supported and examples are given).

This is the best XSLT reference that I've found, but beware that much of the examples do not work in Microsoft IE 5.0 (or even 5.5 -- even with the latest 3.0 msxml parser). There are several issues, one of which is that the "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" XSL namespace is not recognized and an older one must be used, instead). But the book references several parsers that *do* work with the latest XSLT spec, including XP and XT.

This is really a great book on XSLT, XPath, and XSL!

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Converting XML documents, October 13, 2002

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The XSL Companion (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

Computing seems to have a propensity to generate an
awesome acronym soup; two examples being XSL and XSLT.
The difference between these is rather nuanced.
Frankly, for most purposes, I would consider them
interchangeable. But if you really want to know the
difference, this book does a neat job explaining.

Both have to do with manipulating XML documents. XSLT
transforms an XML document into another document. The
output can be XML, or any other format, with XHTML
being a popular choice. XSLT does not necessarily have
anything to do with presentation, per se. It is a
declarative language, like SQL, and unlike C or java,
which are procedural languages. If the latter is your
background, this may be your biggest impedence
mismatch. Takes some getting used to. But the text is
clearly written to help you along.

Pure XSL, on the other hand, is an XML based
formatting language. It is explicitly for displaying
documents. In fact, it draws many of its property
names and actions from CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
This was done to let those familiar with the latter
pick up XSL quickly. There is a long chapter on XSL
that goes exhaustively through its many properties.
TeX and troff gurus will see numerous layout concepts
redone here in new flesh.

Overall, a very useful and up to date book. The
examples and accompanying text do succinctly convey
the meanings intended. This book has clarity. You are
not deluged in unnecessarily complicated explanations.

I do have some caveats. Firstly, tree diagrams are
drawn from left to right?! Those from a computer
science background are used to trees always being
drawn from top to bottom. A minor thing, but still a
little offputting. Like reading a book where all the
pages are in landscape mode, instead of portrait mode.

Secondly, XML is case sensitive, unlike HTML, as the
author points out. So, for example, <body> and <BODY>
mean the same thing in HTML. But <atag> and <ATAG> are
not the same in XML. The problem is that in many
places, the author writes a tag in a body of code, in
lower case, like <root>. But he then refers to it in
the text as Root, capitalised for emphasis. This can
be very confusing to an XML newcomer.

Lastly, many chapters could have done with problem
sets and possibly answers. I understand that this
would add to the book length. But it would greatly aid
the reader, by giving her something to attack, instead
of merely reading. Subject retention and all that.
Especially apropos because the subject lends itself to
explicit problem composition. Answers are objective;
not just some vague essay writing. Plus, unlike some
other software topics, the questions and answers can
be concisely stated. There is no need for a mass of
source code.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book; short, to the point and well written, December 30, 2000

By	J. DEATS (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

With index and all this book is just a tad over 300 pages. For the price you may be tempted to look to other books; I would urge you not to. After a in depth read of the first three chapters and a quick scan of the remaining chapters I feel this author is very capable of providing condensed information for the intermediate-advanced level developer. Any more than 300 pages would require unneeded "fluff" thrown in to attempt to make the book more useful to everyone, and would only frustrate the intermediate-advanced developer who's time is valuable.

For my needs this book was perfect. It povided very detailed information on XSL and explained how XSL relates to XSLT and XPath, it also explained XQL. If you pick up a general XML book you usually will only find one or two chapters (two at best) discussing XSL. This book is intended as a companion to a general XML book (XML For Dummies, or this authors own XML Companion come to mind) this book assumes you know what XML is, what a DTD is, etc...

I have searched for a book to teach XSL to perform complex filtering and grouping in the output, prior to reading this book I had read: XML for dummies (IDG Press) and Professional ASP XML (Wrox Press), this book goes into much better detail and is a pefect companion to both of the books listed above.

The authors writting style is excellent, he provides many short examples of input/processing and output code in each chapter. He does not hold your hand and many of his descriptions have to be read a few times to fully grasp (XSL isn't as simple as you may think). Overall I feel very comfortable in saying this is the best book (and one of the only books) on the market to fully explain current XSL standards.