Sams Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes

by Andrew H. Watt (Author)

13 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0672324710

ISBN-10: 0672324717

Why is ISBN important?

Paperback

$20.40 - $20.80

Other Sellers

from

Other Sellers

See all 2 versions

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Ships from and sold by YourOnlineBookstore.

Available at a lower price from other sellers that may not offer free Prime shipping.

List Price: $24.99 Details

Save: $4.19 (17%)

FREE delivery April 4 - 5. Details

Available at a lower price from other sellers that may not offer free Prime shipping.

XML is the de-facto standard for manipulating and sharing data among applications. It is supported by every major programming tool and language, including Java, Microsoft .NET, Oracle, SQL Server, etc. All professional developers and administrators - even those who don't intend to build XML applications - need a basic understanding of it just to read and maintain data they receive and process. Many of them don't have the time for a thick reference book or detailed tutorial. Sams Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes quickly covers the basics of XML and its family of related concepts, including basic syntax, DTDs, XML Schema, DOM, SAX, XSL, and XPath. Each topic is illustrated with an example to ensure readers' understanding.

From the Back Cover

XML is the de-facto standard for manipulating and sharing data among applications. It is supported by every major programming tool and language, including Java, Microsoft .NET, Oracle, SQL Server, etc. All professional developers and administrators - even those who don't intend to build XML applications - need a basic understanding of it just to read and maintain data they receive and process. Many of them don't have the time for a thick reference book or detailed tutorial. Sams Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes quickly covers the basics of XML and its family of related concepts, including basic syntax, DTDs, XML Schema, DOM, SAX, XSL, and XPath. Each topic is illustrated with an example to ensure readers' understanding.

About the Author

Andrew Watt is an independent consultant and author with knowledge and interest in XML and graphics topics. He is the author of Designing SVG Web Graphics (New Riders, 2001) and XPath Essentials (John Wiley & Sons, 2002). He is a co-author of XML Schema Essentials (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), Sams Teach Yourself JavaScript in 21 Days (Sams, 2002), and SVG Unleashed (Sams, 2002). He is also a contributing author to Platinum Edition Using XHTML, XML, and Java 2 (Que, 2000), Professional XML, Second Edition (Wrox Press, 2001), Professional XSL (Wrox Press, 2001), Professional XML Meta Data (Wrox Press, 2001), and Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition (Que, 2002).

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sams Publishing (October 22, 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0672324717
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0672324710
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.43 x 0.69 x 8.03 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,372,790 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #529 in XML Programming (Books)
- #14,190 in Computer Programming Languages
- #27,603 in Computer Software (Books)

Customer Reviews:
13 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Andrew H. Watt

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

5 star		22%
4 star		33%
3 star		29%
2 star		8%
1 star		8%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

MedIT

Acceptable coverage of a difficult subject

Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2010

Verified Purchase

I really like the Teach Yourself In 10 min books and own a number of them. This is clearly the weakest that I've encountered. It reads like an abridged version of a number of related (dry) specifications spiked with a couple of examples.

I'll grant that making XML interesting is hard. After all the topics covered are much more than specifications; however, the lack of details on use cases and implementation was unfortunate. This problem was made worse by the age of the book and thus relative obsolescence of many of the implementations referenced.

The other major problem is the distribution of effort. Every heading in the book got roughly equally treatment regardless of complexity. The result is that relatively simple concepts are covered in ponderous detail while more complex topics provide little more information than an annotations of a single working example would.

An updated book with more discussion of contemporary applications and the whys and hows of XML with less discussion of trivial whats would be nice.

All of that said, I wasn't looking for an expert understanding just a baseline familiarity and I feel like I got that out of this book (or at least enough to inform a couple of high yield google searches). I read every page, it was painful at times but possible.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Science Geek

Look elsewhere: this is a poorly organized confusion bolus

Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2015

I give it two stars for the first chapter, which is about the level of a brief online summary. The rest of the book is pretty poorly organized, constantly bringing up things without defining them, telling you to wait N chapters to cover the topic. XML is relatively simple, and this book somehow manages to make it confusing and complicated by its organization. Instead of starting with very simple things and working from there, it starts with the more abstract concepts, explains them poorly without good examples, and mentions future chapters where it might become more clear. This is the worst computer book I have read in a couple of years.

Helpful

The Basics - short and sweet and to the point

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2003

"SAMS Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes" is an introductory text for people who want to learn XML. While the author covers XML in sufficient detail for the complete novice to understand, he also gives illustrations of how it resembles and differs from HTML. I have done some basic HTML and Java programming before and found that the transition to learning XML was easy with the assistance of this book. It contains enough basic stuff that nothing important is missed but moves along quick enough to keep it from becoming repetitive and boring. By the end I not only could write simple XML documents, but also was working with Cascading Style Sheets and the Document Object Model. This is a great introductory course that equips the reader with all the basics of XML. There is a lot more to XML than what is in this book, but "SAMS Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes" is a thorough course in the basics of XML. This is a recommended purchase for anyone wanting to get a basic level understanding of XML.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Salman M

A vague introduction, easily beaten by the sketchiest source on the web

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2008

The book is written in a very boring English. The author tries to describe everything in text, whereas a simple example would have gone a long way.
The examples are scarce inside the text. Well, at least "good examples" are... Whenever the author reaches the simple concepts such as parsed entities, he gives a couple of examples, but for more complicated ones such as unparsed, the examples are vague and trivial.
The same goes for explaining the attributes: CDATA is explained thoroughly (as in all other resources available on the web), but ID, IDREF, NMTOKEN,... just mentioned in one line, without a single example. I had to spend a lot of time surfing the web to find some clear explanations.
You could argue that he was trying to present a brief introduction. Well, that's not exactly true. He tries to touch everything, but in the least clear way possible.
There are tons of better books on XML out there. Don't waste your time and money.

Helpful

talkaboutquality

Dry but clear, and a bit longer than 10 minutes

Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2006

The real title should be "Learn all about what XML is, with a few examples, in a bit over 3 hours, ten minutes at a time." But that wouldn't sell the book by its cover. Very clear, following the "tell you, tell you, told you" style. A bit dry but mostly very easy learning since it's in ten-minute chunks. Takes the mystery out of XML. Opens your eyes to all that it can do. Finally makes clear what a "DOM" is (document object model.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Very wordy

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2009

The material is there for learning XML basis, but the prose is hard to wade through. I think the writing could be cut down by about 40% if needless verbage was removed.

I was still confused about XML namespaces after reading the chapter on namespaces.

The first chapter on XSLT had decent example code, but the explanations were very difficult to follow.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Pete Zicato

Really bad

Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2003

I've been a software engineer for 20+ years. This is the worst technical book that I can recall. Way too many forward references - "Now I'll use a technical term that I won't explain for another two chapters".
Most technical books have some forward references but this is ridiculous. To make it worse, some of the terms are never clearly explained even when you get to that section of the book.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Daniel M. Zschomler

Fall asleep in 10 minutes

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2003

I have tried to read this book over the course of two weeks, I can't get more than a couple pages without nearly passing out. This thing reads like stereo instructions. I can not comment on how accurate the information is, as the author is so boring, I can't retain any of it. No specific examples, all very vauge references.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Mantovani

Not bad but needs updating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 29, 2009

Verified Purchase

The book sets out to examine the world of XML in 19 "lessons" which break the subject down into manageable bites; however there is a large amount of referencing chapters which occur later in the book which sometime leads to confusion. On the whole the book is a reasonable starting place for a beginner but if you have encountered XML "in the flesh" it soon becomes obvious that areas it states as being in development are in fact common place coding techniques.

One person found this helpful

Sreeraj

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 25, 2014

Verified Purchase

its a good read, if you are new to XML

frasal

Good to start

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2014

Verified Purchase

As I expected, It's a good choice to learn about XML and introduce all the principles of this language and technology.
Received during the expected delivery time.

See all reviews

Sams Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Andrew H. Watt

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries