In XML Specification Guide, authors Ian S. Graham and Liam Quin don't attempt to reinvent the wheel by teaching XML in their own words. Instead, they present the actual 1.0 specification from the World Wide Web Consortium and enhance it with useful background information, definitions, and reference tables.
The book begins with a "bootstrap" tutorial that examines basic XML documents and offers an overview of Document Type Definitions (DTD). This section leads the reader through discussions of entities, DTD subsets, tokenized attribute types, CDATA, and string normalization--all of the tongue-twisting terms that make up the heart of XML. Plenty of code snippets illustrate the concepts, but the writing is aimed at a developer-level audience.
The second part of the book is the XML specification itself, buttressed with inserted notes, annotations, and a limited number of examples. Since you're reading from the actual standard, you can rest assured that you're getting the instruction right from the source.
The third section of the book presents a series of additional technical appendices that the authors feel are important. These include style issues, character sets, comparisons between HTML and XML, a discussion of schemas versus DTDs, and a glossary. Augmented by a companion Web site, this is a fine resource for any Web developer's desk. --Stephen W. Plain
From Library Journal
This manual is "for developersAthat is, people who are or will be designing XML applications, or writing software that will process XML." Some of the areas covered by Graham and Quin are the basic XML document, designing your own document type declarations (DTDs), entities and parameters, notation, a lengthy discussion of the formal XML specification by the w3.org, and the relationship among XML, HTML, and SGML. For more advanced computer collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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