XSLT Quickly (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Covers the basics of XSLT and provides instruction for techniques in document manipulation. Guide makes it easier to find solutions to most development problems. Included are a glossary and ai reference for XSLT syntax. Softcover.

About the Author

DuCharme is the "Transforming XML" columnist for XML.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 298 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930110111
• ISBN-13: 978-1930110113
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #371,641 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite XSLT books, May 19, 2003

By	Margarita Isayeva (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This book, as the author himself put it, provides "task-oriented explanations of how to get work done with XSLT". I would define the audience that will benefit most as intermediate XSLT developers - you are expected to have some knowledge of XML and XSLT. Part 1 has a brief tutorial, yet too brief for a complete novice. Part 2 is what makes this book worth reading - it delves into typical tasks XSLT developers encounter: adding, changing, deleting elements and attributes, sorting, avoiding duplicates and many other. Perhaps, the book was planned as a "cookbook" to quickly look up "how do I...", but it is more than that: the author describes how things work in detail, shows the best way to perform a task, warns about subtle issues you would spend hours fighting with on your own. I found the explanations very useful: even reading about basic concepts can bring discoveries. There are more advanced topics too, like dealing with namespaces or recursive techniques; read about them, and more challenging tasks will not catch you unprepared.

The book doesn't touch on really advanced concepts like the famous Muenchian grouping, but this is probably outside of XSLT's everyday repertoire and, therefore, outside of this book's mission.

I found myself referring to this book often in JavaRanch's XML forum. Just recently when solving RSS namespace mystery, I posted a part of the stylesheet that prints namespaces (p.99) and here is the response: "That diagnostic transform is worth its weight in gold!"

And I am neither the author nor a member of his family.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent tutorial for XSLT developers, August 9, 2001

By	"michael_maron" (Stamford, CT United States) - See all my reviews

XSLT is not an easy language to learn - mostly because it is close to Lisp rather than to well-known string processing languages like Perl.

XSLT QUICKLY covers XPath, XML elements and attributes manipulation, programming issues like named templates (a.k.a. functions), variables, parameters, XSLT-specific constructs like key lookups, number and string manipulation.

Readers will find _good_ ways to generate HTML, other markup and plain text from XML documents.

I think this book is a must for software developers who want to write and test robust portable XSLT scripts.

Simple, understandable and informative sample code is a true challenge for any computer book. I really appreciate samples from XSLT QUICKLY, they are easy for recycling in real-life applications. Also, like Oracle code samples, they are convenient to communicate development issues.

Last, but not least, just in the preface we find an important clarification of XML/DTD/XSLT relationship, so readers will avoid a good deal of painful confusion.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quickly, goodly and nicely, November 14, 2008

By	Russ Urquhart - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've just sent several months working my way through Bob Ducharme's Xslt Quickly, referred to here as XQ. It took me a little while as I can be a little dense. So can Xslt. This book, however, does a very good job of explaining fairly carefully, with real world examples, the basics of Xslt.

While my background is in programming, however i work as a tech writer, Xslt programming was different from what i had seen in the past, and to be honest, i had my doubts about this language and its use with xml at all.

It took me a couple of times to get my mind around xslt but suffice it to say that now i am hooked. XQ presents introductory material as well as features of the language/programming in good sized chunks. The sections are designed so that the reader can skip around if they want to, as well as a straight read. I had purchased an e-book version of the book when i thought i could no longer find my hard copy. (I of course found the hard copy version shortly thereafter.) This worked out well, as i felt much better making notes in the printed out version of the e-book. This is a good option to have.
I feel that XQ has whetted my appetite to learn more about XSLT, while giving me a good foundation on which to work from.
I think XQ can teach you some, simple, yet very powerful idioms within Xslt that you can use immediately. The writing is not dense or boring, yet it is pretty comprehensive. I would certainly recommend this!


Russ Urquhart