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46 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most complete book in XML I've read (almost excellent), January 26, 2000
Although the user level as mentioned on the back cover is Intermediate-Advanced, I would say that this book would also serve as a nice introduction to XML since the content is well-formed, precise and accurate and the author explores each subject not only from the standard's point of view but also gives helpful advices on the most widely used tools and practices on the market.This title introduces the reader to a wide range of information about XML, such as the definition of the language, the many ways to manipulate data with it (databases, scripting, ASPs etc.) and the benefits/practices of XML on the web. Part VII was a particularly pleasant surprise. It featured information about many diverse XML applications like MathML, P3P, VML, VoxML etc. I feel that the choice I've made to order it before it was even published (in early December) was a good one. The only drawback was that because it covered so many different topics it lacked in-depth analysis in some of them. Of course that's nothing that the W3C site can't fix...
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
okay, good topic selections,"professional xml" is better, July 14, 2000
I have bought several xml books and wanted to mention my opinions. The best book so far seems to be Professional XML by Wrox. For variety's sake, I also bought, XML Unleashed, a bulky book with not as much organization, but just a lot of code (unlike the professional xml book, which really explained almost everything well). XML unleashed is helpful, because its topics really don't overlap with professional xml. It discusses SMIL, parsing xml with java xml tools on the market, using asp with xml and different subsets of xml (vml, and a variety of other specialized languages specific to one discipline. Unleashed is good because it contains discussions (albeit rather brief) of several different languages. Professional XML sticks to explanations and analysis, a lot of microsoft stuff (but not asp,) and not too much stuff that linux lovers would want to reject the book. Finally I want to mention another book which I used as a first tutorial, Just XML by John Simpson. It's the best written of the three, although a little bizzare humor sometimes. It was written in late 1998 so some things may not be up-to-date (however simpson does a good job of emphasizing the things that weren't likely to change). This would be a good book for people starting, or if the book were bought at a discount. It would also be good when simpson publishes the second edition (later this year).
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Thick book of information, disjointed and rambling., July 17, 2000
Because I own another well-written book in Sams' "Unleashed" series, I bought this one. What I was looking for was a good XML reference with concise sections on rules of grammer. Instead this is a hot and cold running dialog that has an irritating tendency to skip ahead of itself by telling the reader the only way to learn is to plunge in. After presenting an example details are omitted as the reader is told that such and such a feature won't explained until chapter 38 so please ignore. As an example of how difficult this book is to use as an XML reference, I dug and finally found in one of chapter 2's paragraphs a discussion of the '?' and '+' cardinality operators. However, for some reason the third operator '*' had to wait for chapter 3. Their descriptions were incomplete if not down right wrong and the term "cardinality operator" appears nowhere in the entire book. For example the description for '*' says it is used "to indicate that the entire choice group is optional." This description most closely matches the '?' operator. With '*' the group is allowed to appear zero or more times. The In contrast in Wrox's "Professional XML" all three operators are included prominently in a box with a description of each. The material in this book would have been much more useful if the author and editor would have taken adequate time to better organize it.
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