Markup Languages Books

I used this book in 2001 to learn XML and it was great then.

In the last week I have been looking at transforming xml on the client. A lot of designs transform on the server, but I really wanted to investigate a full xml approach. This shows you how to take an xml feed and use a client generated file ( XSLT or HTML ) to transform that data into a dynamic web page. Unfortunately this only works on IE, but the book explains how to do this easily.

I had never used XML for anything, but I knew it had become very important in today's world. I was a little hesitant at first, since some MS Press books I'd read in the past were very dry and technical. To the contrary, however, this book is very well written with easy-to-understand examples. It provided me, someone who knew nothing of XML, with a very gentle introduction to the subject matter. It's very readable and you'll walk away from it with a very strong foundational knowledge of XML.

If you don't know anything about XML (like me two years ago), this is the first book that you should read. This book contains clear explanations backed by good samples and "step-by-step" exercises. You don't have to read the whole book to be efficient when using XML in your project. I only read the first few charters and I already began to code XML. If I can do it, so can you.

I purchased this book in hopes it would clear some things up as I took XML as a college crash class. This is an excellent starting point for those wanting to learn XML or anyone needing more explanation. The terms and procedures are explained so that you understand how and what with out going into a lot of theory. The examples are wonderful,and unlike some books, so far all the code works. It is easy to understand and it makes sense and doesn't leaving you wondering what was just said.
I give this book a thumbs up!

This book is a great start to the language of XML! The author makes a lot of HTML references, but a beginner could probably grasp it. He begins with the basics and history to give the reader an great understanding of what they are about to get in to. In the first few chapters, you have mastered the basics of XML!! I highly reccomend this book! It goes slow enough for those who may get confused, but keep up the pace for those who get it quickly!

This book is small and travels well. It does not have an index, which seems odd for a reference text, but it does have a table of contents. I find Essential XML Quick Reference (ISBN 0-201-74095-8) to be well worth the additional investment.

This book provides a useful overview into the basics of XML while doubling up as a quick reference to the XML specification. Handy for those that want to dabble in XML without buying a more detailed book, but then XML has so many related technologies anyone serious about XML will need more.

The O'Reilly pocket references are so concise that they are not really meant for someone who is totally new to the subject. They can however be the ideal way to provide an overview to anyone who wants to know the basics of the topic.

I can't possibly imagine that this book will be of any value to someone working with XML on a daily basis. It should be renamed to "a terse introduction to xml", as it is in no way a reference. This is based on the fact that I bought it to learn XML from, and it was quite good at teaching someone with no experience in XML whatsoever the basic concepts.

If you are looking for a reference, look elsewhere. If you are just like me, and don't want to wade through hundreds of pages to get an idea of what it is all about, then you can perhaps consider it. Since it is so wrongly named, I give it three stars. But as an introduction it really deserves five.

This book is ok, the first half part is pretty good.
It covers XML basic and DTD very well, but it does not
cover schema; it covers XSLT/XSLFO also, although there are something inaccurate inside; its part for XLink and XPointer is
useless and wrong; and there is nothing for XML database or
XSP. This book may be helpful, but you need another book as <> or <> to really learn XML basic.

Daniel, IBM certified developer for XML and related technologies.

I guess it's my fault for not checking closely enough, but this book is somewhat dated now (more than two years old as of this writing). It was somewhat of an impulse buy at the book store when it looked useful after a quick scan. It had a little "2nd Edition" banner across the front cover corner and I just assumed it included coverage of schemas. The coverage of XSLT and XML in a small format is quite useful. I'll probably buy the 3rd edition when it comes out--I would have given the book 4 or 5 stars two years ago when it was first published.

I never received order. I emailed and never received a response and will not ever order from Amazon again

This is an excellent book for the person who wants to learn HTML but has no prior experience in Web Publishing. I read the majority of the book in one weekend and created my first website! The book gives you the basics to create a usable and stylish website. If the user wants more interactivity on their webpage, they will have to go somewhere else, but this is a good start. The book does teach frames and tables which is important for layout. I recommend this book to the novice Web Publisher.

This is an excellent book for the person who wants to learn HTML but has no prior experience in Web Publishing. I read the majority of the book in one weekend and created my first website! The book gives you the basics to create a usable and stylish website. If the user wants more interactivity on their webpage, they will have to go somewhere else, but this is a good start. The book does teach frames and tables which is important for layout. I recommend this book to the novice Web Publisher.

This book is fantastic for the individual who wants to learn HTML quickly. Although it does not delve into the advanced topics too far, it is a good starting point. Lemay's style is straight forward and will have you writing web pages in no time. With this book and CGI 101/102 you could be designing and programming for the web in a basic capacity in a week, but by no means stop there!

It's very helpful. Easy to read and understand. All beginners should buy this book.

When I first started learning html I did not understand what it was about. I bought this book and I've learned alot about html. This is a great book. It also talks a little bit about other things dealing with web page making such as CSS and other.
Thumbs up on this book.

This book is the best in market for learning HTML.

I found this easy to use and it has everything you need to create beautiful web pages.

My searches were easily found and all my questions were answered with this book. I call it my HTML bible!

Believe this to be one of the best book I have read for learning and keeping up with HTML. You won't go wrong with this book. Very easy to read and understand. Great for the beginner and an excellent reference for the pro.

I received this book for Christmas and thought it would be like most other HTML books, rather "incomplete", as in skipping around and not really covering the topics. But, I was terribly wrong! I have been using it for 4 days now, and have read every piece of information on the 165 pages I have consumed hungrily.

Even though I already know HTML, this book helped me realise, that, since I taught myself HTML by looking at other people's pages, I learned a slap-dash method, and when I read this book I see all the places where I've gone wrong.

It is extremely thorough, and covers all topics you could possibly need to know about HTML 4.0. I think the CD is an extremely good idea, because I didn't have an editing environment already, and I sure didn't have any of the animation tools I will need later on in the book! So, now, I'm fully equipped (as they say).

I would reccommend this book to any novice through advanced reader. Everyone can learn something from this book, and have fun doing it! I never thought I would enjoy going through and taking notes and highlighting a 1,000+ page book, but I LOVE IT! I come back from my run every morning and dash to the computer and start working in this book. Please consider this book before any other!

Owners of the book can download a zip file. The zip file contains all the examples, which there are few. You only get 3 examples in the first 6 chapters. I don't really want to read and read and read, I want to practice. The examples in the remaining chapters mostly build on a site adding headers, columns, and footers. I'm not sure I'll get that far, I prefer to learn by doing, not by reading. Here is the breakdown:

Chapter 1 -- 1 example
Chapter 2 -- No examples
Chapter 3 -- No examples
Chapter 4 -- No examples
Chapter 5 -- 2 examples
Chapter 6 -- No examples
Chapter 7 -- 6 examples
Chapter 8 -- 8 examples
Chapter 9 -- 4 examples
Chapter 10 -- 7 examples

In all fairness, the reading chapters do teach a lot, and give the foundation for the practice parts that come later.

I don't know if I will keep the book. The price point is fair but I'm having trouble following along without seeing any examples..

An Excellent and very informative book. Not only does it have a complete list of CSS 2.1 compliant listings, property by property , but practical use and examples that make it easy to understand and apply. You can't beat Amazon's price. I purchased this and "The CSS Anthology" for the same price as one of the books at BN or Borders. AN Excellent Addition to the Web Programmers Library!

Its a great book, but doesn't push very far for creativity. Some books smash the information through to you in such a way like its picture book... extreme use of examples. I'm more of the "just give me the methods and information clearly, and lemme fiddle around with my own creativity." The entire book I was thinking to myself "how can I take these examples and convert them into actual web page designs I want to make?"

Despite that, there is still a lot of information crammed into it. It has a beefy index, but then again, I wish it had more CSS "tricks." Like methods and ideas for pushing css possibilities to the extreme, despite minimal browser compatibility. It didn't shoot for the sky..

I honestly didn't use CSS too much in the past and I always used tables for my layout. However, this book has quickly shown me everything I needed to know to become proficient and confident in using CSS; it has also allowed me to discontinue using tables (except for certain situations, i.e. tabular data). This book is a very easy read and a great reference to keep on your desk for all your CSS needs.

I'm not going to launch into a rhapsody like some reviewers do, pointlessly going beyond the pail dissecting a web design book like this. For me I just want to see if a book has what I need to get me where I need to go! Here's the facts - jack.

- The title is misleading, you will learn to design without tables, however that's not where the book is focused, if you expect myriad examples of how to layout pages with CSS you will be disappointed (as I was).

- Almost half of the book is reference!

- It is well written and a good book for those with some (x)html experience looking to power up with CSS.

- Is it worth the money? For me it wasn't since I want a book that's chock full of layout examples - however it's a good deal for those looking to learn CSS.
Of course you can learn all of the stuff in this book online for free, there's many great CSS sites out there.

So there you have it! A sucker free review with no superfluous wordage.

This book doesn't have anything I couldn't find by just looking at samples on Sun's site.

Most of all, it's missing security like XML Signatures, and XML encryption.

This book is great if you know something about XML and Java. For true beginners, well, it's a stretch. It also starts to show its age, and furthermore, its supporting website - both on the author's web server and O'Reilly's own servers, is sketchy. You will rely on both to use the code mentioned in the book.
Otherwise, it is just an unremarkable information piece about Java and XML.

Second editions are always great. However, I find that I dont like all of the API reference in the book. I would rather look at APIs electronically and talk concepts in the book.

The author covers some background, but mainly sticks to the business end of dealing with XML using java. The book is set out so you can read the parts that are relevant to getting a particular piece of technology working quickly.

Before reading this book I had never written an XML parser, but within a couple of days I was able to rework a parser to make it work both faster and with a smaller memory footprint by following the guidelines in this book. The details are not covered in great depth, but enough to get a job done, and make this a portabe reference.

Another book worth owning from the O'Reilly press.

Compared with .NET and XML this book tends to wander and rat hole a little. The book covers the basics. The SAX and DOM approaches. It also covers XSLT and serving XML. It also covers advanced topics like Castor, JDOM, and web services. But most of the subjects are covered at a cursory level and do not serve as a complete introduction.

There is a small reference at the end of the book which is not as easy to read as the APIs described in the Nutshell style.

I gave this book four stars because, while it does lack focus, it is a good introduction to the XML APIs for Java. In the third release they should concentrate a little harder editing in some focus and a better reference section at the end.

i'm a teacher (and a very good one...) I know how to teach from scratch
this book is confusing and not clear (overall for somebody new to this language)
errors galore...
ex : page 116 they ask to get a file (smlogo.pct) in chap08... well, it's not there, is on chap06
who supervise this books?
the URL she put as example are not there!
oh well...
to much hype and very low quality (and I bougth a lots of books to teach myself...
miss Weinman, can you send me my money back?
thanks
Fernando Torm

This is a very good book, in a cheap price, which is a very good beginning for anyone who wants to build his own website. It's also a useful book for professionals.

The book is explaining each topic in the best way, and it also has many good samples, and a guide to the HTML tags.

I would NOT recommend this book for beginners - books for beginners should be almost free of errors, and this one is not. File names and paths in the book don't match those on the accompanying CD, the HTML in the book doesn't match perfectly what is in the files, the referenced sites don't exist anymore. And the book site does not list the corrections. Also, for a book targeted at beginners, many engineering terms are used before they are defined. The chapters on color were particularly difficult, and I think might have been better located later in the book. The book/CD is ok for someone with a technical background who might be able to pick up on the mistakes and get past them. But generally it could have used a good quality assurance pass before it was published, verifying the exercises worked as described and the logic of the sequence of chapters. If that work had been done, then this would be a good, useful book.

I bought this book with high hopes of learning to hand-code html but found it to be a complete hindrance. The number of typographical errors is a crime. There are examples of design pitfalls to avoid followed by code examples that accomplish exactly what you're told not to do. The code examples have very inconsistent syntax and are very confusing for beginners. There are step by step procedures in Photoshop listing menu options in the wrong places and some that simply don't exist. If you already know the program you might be able to figure it out, but if not--you're lost. Though the companion website does list errata, the sloppiness of this book is inexcusable. On top of that, the faded colors of the text and graphics make for difficult legibility. All of this makes one wonder about the design skills of this self-professed web guru.

Overall, this book is an excellent choice for learning how to work effectively with HTML. It covers most everything you need to know in one place (albeit in over 400 pages), so you don't need a stack of books, wondering in which one to look for the info you want.

This book is very useful and usable, but I almost didn't even consider it after reading another reviewer's comments. Luckily, I was able to browse an actual copy of the book and found something quite different. (In particular, if this book failed to adequately address tables that would be enough to question its utility. But in fact there's ample coverage of the use of tables! It covers the basics, intermediate-level usage, tips and some special caveats. Definitely not just about graphic placement!)

I agree with most reviews for DHTML Utopia; the book is middle level, leaving beginners in the dust but pros wanting more. It is, however, well written and contains very good code and coding standards. If you are not completely new to JavaScript and DOM scripting, but would like to learn more and make sure your code is up to today's standards, then this book is for you. If you are very familiar with web scripting and/or have been writing your own unobtrusive client side code then go with a more detailed book.

This book has a lot of great stuff but you have to have the patience to sit down and read it line by line. Can't scan through the book and hope to learn something. Even need to type in the script and try it yourself. Some of the most important ideas the author just covered in two sentences. It does teach a lot of useful stuff but it is absolutely not a beginner's book. Save me from my job interview.

This is without doubt the worst book on DHTML/Javascript that I've ever read. The author tries to be cute, funny and authorative but ends up just plain painful. The examples are over-long and artificial, and would be difficult to incorporate into a real world application. The author peppers the book with snazzy shots like "It's the modern way!" but rarely explains the benefits of the methodology he's pushing, and glosses over any shortcomings.
For instance, in discussing regular expressions he provides a simple expression for a telephone number, then points out that it's seriously flawed. But it's "suitable for our discussion" so onward we press, and a correct solution is never provided. Bad luck if you were after such a beast. (Footnotes abound - often just URLs to now broken links - so you have to wonder why he couldn't have provided the solution at the bottom of the page.) The part on Ajax is a joke - he just plugs in an out-of-date version of the Sarissa library and never scratches below the surface.
Beware.

As a developer with no prior JavaScript experience, I've been very disappointed with this book. In the Introduction section, the author says "Some experience with JavaScript might also be useful, but it is by no means critical" (Page VIII) which isn't true.

Throughout the book, the author will keep assuming (implicitly) that you already have a good programming background (he uses a more complex logic in his code),and will leave many things unexplained or explained too late. This alone will easily guarantee frustration. NO BOOK EVER frustrated me that much.

Another issue is that the book uses some very complicated examples with complex logic. Unlike other decent coding books, instead of starting with simple functional examples and developing them\it as you read a chapter, the author uses one big example and "tries" to explain it part by part throughout the chapter. This might force you to "memorize" the script(s) since they contain too much code to understand (which is not the point). To make sure if the examples of the book suit you or not, download the free sample chapters from Sitepoint.com and check the "table highlight" example at the end of chapter 3. That's how most of the examples will be presented. (with more code of course)

Now don't get me wrong, the topics covered in this book are great, but it seems that the only people who will really appreciate it are those who already have a good background in JavaScript (logic,functions,methods...etc) NOT beginners like myself. So if you're trying to learn JavaScript\DOM, then go find a better book (such as "DOM scripting").

(this was originally published on www.last-child.com)

This is a difficult book to read for non-javascript programmers. If you are more comfortable with HTML and CSS, I'd recommend reading Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting first. Keith explains the theories behind this book.

That said, I did learn enough from DHTML Utopia to not look like a complete idiot during my job interview with Yahoo. This book is filled with project examples for you to follow along with. I will say that I tried several of the examples and had mixed results. I visited the book's web site to get updated code.

If you've already worked with Javascript, this is a great book to have on the shelf. If you are a rookie, start with Jeremy Keith and follow up with DHTML Utopia.

You mean like how DOS was supposed to be replaced by better operating systems by 1982? Really -- we're going to be stuck with plain 'ol HTML for decades.

So you've learned HTML and DHTML and CSS and who needs another bunch of angle brackets?

Oh, well. XML is perfectly symetric (no more unbalanced "BR"s). Isn't that nice?

But there's no getting around it. You've gotta learn XML because everybody really is moving toward its adoption. This book will do a good job of getting you started. It took me all the way from a standing start to creating my own Windows Channel (CDF) which is quite a lot.

The book "XML Applications" will take you to the next step and these things become dated quickly. But if you start here, you will be happy about it.

No software support, the contents are not comply with the technology. I couldn't get anything out of it. I found myself reading sample chapters from here and there.

This book has been updated by Elliotte Harold and for some unfortunate reason is now called The XML Bible. (unfortunate for me, I just got this book to discover that it's completely revised. I'm out $32.)

...if you are interested in a concise overview of the W3C open-standard XML technology, as opposed to a getting yet another Microsoft sales pitch (a la Wrox).

Every book on every Internet technology gets outdated fast. The book is outdated. That being said, I found the book clear, fast, and easy to understand.

The author went to extensive pains to point out how quickly things were shifting in XML. His examples were well thought out, logical, and contained few (if any) obvious errata. Furthermore, he took the trouble to point out the cases where the commercial toolage failed to correctly implement the W3C standard. Readers who can deal with these caveats will find it a good way to come up to speed in a vendor-neutral manner.

I was aware that the book was obsolete when I bought it. But I reviewed the alternatives carefully before I bought and decided that it was the best of the lot. I am happy with my purchase now that it's about 2/3 read. (The O'Reilly version isn't due out until December, or I would have been tempted to buy that instead. I may still.)

I hope that Mr. Harold will update the examples as needed, that he will continue to stick exclusively to the W3C standard, that he will demonstrate using all the available tools (including the emerging open-source tools), and will point out cases where the commercial and open-source tools fail to comply with the W3C standard.

Got an used copy of this for my XML study.

This book was arranged with great concentration of various key concepts in the XML realm. Very concise and quite useful for experienced program developers.

However, the downside of this book is that some of its examples are not consistent with the Interface Definition, for instance, SAX 2.0, example in this book used .addAttribute Method, which could not be found in SAX 2.0 class definition at all, therefore confusion was there. The same problems were there in the DTD chapter, e.g. vague Entity explaination..

For you can get an free copy of this book on the web now, I gave it 3 stars.

Not only explains very clearly all the complex stuff of xml schema when u're a beginner, but also well organized so that it's easy to come back to it when u have a precise questionning.
For me it's THE reference book about xsd, like stroustrup for c++ and kerningam for c.

This is a reference book. It's not intended to read, but rather provide quick reference to just about any XML related topic. Unfortunately, the examples are very short and don't provide a great deal of insite. My next task is to look for a reference book that does provide useful examples -- I hope one exists.

Who can remember all the little details surrounding XML? This book is a great summery of the most important XML technologies. It isn't a tutorial, it isn't for beginners, it's for "What's the name of that XPath function that removes excess spaces?" (normalize-space). Highly recommended for finding answers fast.

Keeping in mind that this is a "quick" reference, this book is organised well and very easy to use. When learning XML I had it by my side many times and almost always found what I was looking for. My only comment for improvement would be a more comprehensive index and maybe some a more suitable cover design (I am constantly pointing people to the text on the cover in order to convice them this is a book about XML).