Markup Languages Books

This is what I wrote the authors of this book:

Dear Anders and Michael,

I recently purchased your book entitled "An Introduction to XML and Web Technologies". I started reading it and I must say that you have done a wonderful job. It reads with ease and your presentation style is as limpid as pure mountain water. I particularly enjoy the fact that you are doing a masterful and in-depth tutorial of several of the recent outputs of the W3C's language mill without losing your critical mind and making accurate remarks for several annoying idiosyncrasies owing their existence more to historical and political reasons rather than simple efficient scientific design.

At any rate, I congratulate you on an excellent book and look forward to reading more of your didactic and scientific publications.

[...]

It would be very interesting to envisage a book in the style of
yours on the so-called Semantic Web. I, for one, as ILOG's current Principal rep in the W3C Rule Interchange Format WG, would welcome your critical eye and approach to this vast and unchartered domain.

Thanks again for writing this book. I will definitely recommend it as an effective and concise reference to the subject to anyone - whether newbie or old-timer.

Best regards,

-hak
--
Hassan Aït-Kaci, Ph.D, Distinguished Scientist R&D
ILOG, Inc. - http://www.ilog.com/ - Product Division
Surrey, BC, Canada - Fri Aug 25 07:40:40 2006 PST

I'm an IT professional who had an XML project coming up in 2 weeks. I needed something to learn quickly and this book did the trick. It was excellent. The topics covered about everything you need to know. The examples were wonderful and it was an easy read (flowed nicely)...which is crucial when reading computer books. I would definately recommend this book to anyone who wants to get up to speed fast. I looked at a couple of other books like this, and this is by far the best. I now ordered the XML Progamming Bible for more serious applications with XML. But without this book, reading the next would be a world of confusion. I give it 5 stars.

This book was a mammoth effort. IE 5 is a very robust web development platform, and to present all the features and particulars of this product is a tall order.

This book offers lots of information to the casual developer as well as a good object model, behavior and XML reference to the hardcore web application developer using IE5.

The examples provided (there is an accompanying CD also) are very portable and may be modified to provide a base code for your web apps.

This is a "must have" as a reference for any developer using IE5.

This book brought to the reader a great style of learning a computer language. Easy enough for a beginner, however, it was challenging enough for a previous html writier. I really enjoyed this book due to the graphic natures and the simplicity to understand the contents. Wonderful explainations followed by very understandable examples of what should have been done. The glossary in this book gives great definitions that are very comprihendable. Also, this book is not a must read the whole thing to understand kind of writing. You can go through whatever chapter you would like. Each chapter contains its original context. It specfies one objective. Overall i would rate this the best HTML learning book I have ever purchased.

From describing, exploring and the integration on Java Script, this comphrehensive book provides JavaScript programmer a better idea in designing Web site. I love this book as it is well-illustrated and emphasizing on the clarification of Web Design. The author has paid enough attention to clearly describe the crucial points that widely needed.

This is an excellent DirXML for those that wishes to implement DirXML in their environment. It is meant to be an introductory book for the product and not an (very) in-depth look at each of the drivers (there are just too many, especially given the size of the book already!). Much of the customization each site needs is really doing XML coding, which is really beyond the scope of the book (and the product, really).

I'm a Web content editor. I prepare Web pages for a corporate intranet. Netscape Navigator is the only browser in use. This book is the only reference that I use because it helps me understand how my HTML code will appear on a user's computer screen. The book is clearly written, well - indexed, and the CDROM has useful information, also

As someone who makes a living dealing with SGML, I can't recommend this book highly enough for anyone who has to get into the details of the language. The SGML Handbook is the Bible, but it's rather short on examples (ahem). On the other hand, among books for acquiring serious SGML understanding on one's own, Parseme 1st has been, for me, the most useful by a mile. I think this is because it can be read either straight through, as a textbook, or in bits and pieces, as a reference. It's extremely well-organized, and any time you want a precise explanation of CONREF or marked sections but don't want to get distracted from the business at hand, there it is.

On the minus side, the programming paradigms it presents predate some standards such as DOM and SAX that promise to dominate XML processing. But the ideas behind these are clearly present, DOM in the Python paradigm and SAX in the Perl. And don't worry that it's not an XML book: basic knowledge of XML _is_ SGML knowledge. If you read this book, even without the sections on programming, you'll be in a position to understand the strengths and limitations of XML very well.

For me, this is an indispensable book.

This is one of my personal favorite HTML books. It's style is really technical, so many people will hate it. For them, I would recommend a more visual book, such as HTML in an Instant, or Teach Yourself Visually HTML. Those two help you get started quickly, without getting bogged down in excessive details. But for those who like a more systematic approach, going through the individual properties of each tag, this book is for you. It has extensive code snippets, details about usage, and a very clear format. It is somewhat dry reading, but the information is really packed in there if you are willing to dig it out. Very nice.

Designed and written specifically to enable librarians to utilize XML to create and organize documents, fine-tune documents with special characters, using Cascading Style Sheets, and displaying information on a library website, "Using XML: a How-To-Do-It Manual and CD-ROM For Librarians by Kwong Bor NG (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, CUNY) truly lives up to its promise as a 'librarian friendly' instructional manual which deftly combines a clearly written, step-by-step presentation with an accompanying CD-ROM which reproduces every exercise so librarians can compare their work on a chapter-by-chapter basis to insure that the documents they create are displaying properly. Simply stated, "Using XML" is an essential and very strongly recommended instructional reference that is a necessity for adequately training library staff members to make the most out of XML in the areas of technical services, metadata, system libraries, and library website development.