Amazon.com: Xml Design and Implementation (Professional): Paul Spencer: Books

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In Professional XML Design and Implementation, author Paul Spencer teaches readers XML through a combination of traditional tutorial and practical applications. Aimed at HTML coders, this book covers Extensible Markup Language (XML) implementation using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and Active Server Pages.

Spencer organizes his book into two distinct parts, with the whole of the book revolving around Centaur--a complete, real-world application that helps users book travel packages using online tour agent and booking systems. XML is the glue between Centaur and external, online travel-related systems.

In the tutorial, the author starts with the Document Object Model (DOM), including the W3C Level 1 DOM, as well as Microsoft's extensions. He uses frequent code snippets to illustrate all of the key elements. Next comes a discussion of how to render XML code in a browser; Spencer talks about how you can do it using cascading style sheets, the DOM, and ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) databinding. A chapter on XSL--the Extensible Stylesheet Language--follows and includes information on how you can use XSL to convert XML formats to other XML formats or to HTML.

Eventually, Spencer guides you through the creation of Centaur in a methodical manner that helps you put XML in perspective and learn valuable techniques. Nine appendices include the XML 1.0 specification and several other key references. This book offers a well-grounded look at XML and its possibilities. --Stephen W. Plain

Product Description
XML is a mark up language which allows you to define your own tags, and to define data rather than format it. The overall concepts of XML are quite well understood but there is little information available about issues of developing applications using XML. By considering the decisions to be made at various stages of the project, it will help readers understand the various aspects of XML and its related technologies. It will stress the benefits of XML in informational systems, where it can be used to separate content from presentation, and in transactional systems, where it can act as a low-cost alternative to EDI protocols.

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

13 Reviews

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Average Customer Review

3.8 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Presents a Terrific Case Study, November 5, 2000

By	Beowulf (Laguna Hills, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Let me put my review in perspective. I have been programming in one language or another for twenty years. I was the project manager for a Fortune 500 company's e-commerce initiative. I do some consulting on the side. In other words, I consider myself to be an veteran programmer.

This is not an introductory text. As with most Wrox "Professional" titles, Spencer presumes a certain level of experience on his reader's behalf. I find these titles to be exactly what I desire: not too simple to be trivial, and yet not as dry as a pure reference text.

XML has been a hot topic for over a year now. As a result, more and more people are trying to get a grasp of this technology. Most of the XML books that I have read (and I own a few) provide reasonable explanations of it. I found that understanding the concepts of XML was simple; it was trying to figure out where to use it that was difficult. These beginning books told me the "how," but not the "when."

"Professional XML Design and Implementation" fills this void nicely. The entire book is dedicated to explaining a realistic scenario from end to end. I will note that this book does focus entirely on Microsoft's implementation of XML, but this is a reasonable choice: even at the present time, IE 5.0 or greater is the only released browser that supports XML (I am not including Netscape 6 PR1 through 3 simply because they are still in beta).

Along the way, Spencer provides us with a clear commentary as to why he made certain design decisions. He also attempts to include some instruction. Most of it is still accurate, but the section on XSL is now very outdated.

The application itself is pretty creative. The code behind it is diverse: server side scripting is used to build XML from data stored in a database; client side scripting is used to build XML data within a browser without requiring round trips. One particularly interesting feature was to save the work done on the client side in a cookie so that it could persist between sessions, before finally being submitted to the server.

I believe that most companies who are interested in XML at the time of this review are more interested in B2B (business to business) scenarios than B2C (business to consumer) ones. The limited browser support mentioned above makes this a reasonable assumption. The last chapter of the book entitled "The Transactional System" provdies some good insight into how XML can be used in a B2B environment.

A small drawback is that the book does not contain (and therefore does not review) the entire code listing for this application. Thankfully the files are available on Wrox' Web site.

This is a great book if you already have at least a cursory understanding of XML, and are looking to understand more about its application. If you are still struggling with the "what is XML?" question, then I recommend that you start with a different title than this one, especially when you consider that the XML/XSL standards have evolved considerably since its writing.

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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clear and Easy to Read, January 13, 2000

By A Customer

I was looking for something that clearly explains and introduces XML and XSL, Paul Spencer has done a good job. The book flows well and is easy to read. While I had little HTML or ASP knowledge which is recommended I was able to follow all the examples and come out with a good understanding. A case study is provided at the end of the book which ties all the concepts together, it requires certain software and hardware components, so I didn't attempt it, but if it's like the rest of the book, it will be clear and methodical.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally an Implementation book of an XML case-study, July 27, 2000

By	Maxime Bombardier (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

Small book, but straight to the point & direct content. I like it. I'm very happy that this book is not, once again, explaining XML from scratch (like most XML book including the VB one). This book contains one case-study and it follows it through the end.

This case-study is about a working and normal web site, one about traveling, so this is finally an XML book that actually have real-life examples and not some useless pieces of code that does not tie in to OUR applications.

For XML newcomers, I would strongly suggest taking a look at Beginning XML first and polish your knowledge with this one.