XSLT Cookbook (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: application recipes, topic maps, delimited data, Code Generation, Creating Reusable, Brad York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...this book is a powerful reference work. The problems tackled are well chosen, the solutions elegant and the explanations carefully and clearly explained." - Rick Stones, Cvu, August 2003

Product Description

Critical for converting XML documents, and extremely versatile, the XSLT language nevertheless has complexities that can be daunting. The XSLT Cookbook is a collection of hundreds of solutions to problems that Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) developers regularly face. The recipes range from simple string-manipulation and mathematical processing to more complex topics like extending XSLT, testing and debugging XSLT stylesheets, and graphics creation with SVG. Recipes can be run directly or tweaked to fit your particular application's needs more precisely. The XSLT Cookbook provides an ideal companion both for developers still figuring out XSLT's template-based approach who want to learn by example, and for developers who know XSLT and want a collection of quickly reusable recipes. Each recipe walks through a problem and a solution, with explanations of the choices made and techniques used in creating that solution, and many recipes include alternate solutions and explore issues like convenience and performance. Among the variety of XSLT books now available, none has the explicit solution-oriented approach of this Cookbook.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 670 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (December 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596003722
• ISBN-13: 978-0596003722
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #888,973 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for people who know XSLT, October 10, 2003

By	Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Some other reviews have said that this is not a book for beginners, which is true. You need to understand the mechanics of XSLT first to get the most out of the book. That's not the real value, however. This book is great because it shows you how to write XSLT well. This is a value that a simple reference will not provide.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good XSLT reference for non-beginners, March 8, 2003

By	N. Tulsian "Movie Lover" (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The book is an excellent practical hands-on reference for
creating solutions in the XML-XSL Transformation domain.

It covers areas from simple string operations to SVG generation
to extending XSLT with Perl, JavaScript and Java.

The author Sal Mangano has good working examples with detailed
descriptions of the code. This makes experimenting with new
code relatively painless.

Being an experienced XSLT developer I found the book easy to
follow. However people new to the concept of XML transformations
would do well to get a basic understanding of the matter before
diving into building solutions using this book.

Having a copy of the XSLT Cookbook during the development
phase of the LCRA.org website project would have reduced the
time needed to craft a good sustainable solution, and reduced
the amount of code I had to redesign to be modular and flexible.

An example is the recommendation : "Prefer 'selecting' and
'matching' over 'filtering'" pg 114, para 3. This allows for
flexible XML schemas.

A companion CD with working example code and a searchable
text of the book on the CD would have been appreciated.
The website at Oreilly does have a downloadable zip file
of the examples.

All in all well worth the $40.00 price of the book,

Neeraj

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great reference for XSLT solutions, March 25, 2003

By	Michael Marr - See all my reviews

The XSLT Cookbook offers more than one hundred code solutions to common XSLT problems. The covered topics range from string operations, handling dates and numbers to converting xml to various formats, like text, HTML or SVG.
The author also included some speciality solutions for working with Visio and Excel documents or generating XTM Topic Maps. The last chapters of the book cover some more advanced topic, like extending XSLT and testing stylesheets.
As it is a Cookbook, the beef of this book are the code examples. All examples I tested so far are of outstanding quality and work great. For the most problems you will encounter when writing stylesheets, this book offers an example. Just look it up and you are there.
The very high quality of this book and it's code examples is impressive. The author Sal Mangano sure put a lot of work and research into this book. And the expertise of Jeni Tennison, as technical reviewer, and Simon St.Laurent, as editor, sure were an important factor in achieving this quality standard.

If you are an absolute beginner, you probably should start with a more tutorial style book, but as soon as you have some basic knowledge of XSLT, this book is a great reference for XSLT solutions.