Markup Languages Books

This is a nice brief introductory overview of xml in general and its implementations in biological research. The thing I liked about it was it was not too intensive on any topic, and it provided a lot of useful resources both online and literature-wise for me to look up for more information.

It definitely sparked my interest in certain areas of xml and how I may apply it towards my research. One of the things that I really liked was that the author always spelled out all the mentioned acronyms (thank you, finally someone exists out there that does this!). In addition, I also appreciated that the author did not get too bogged down in anyone topic resulting in a bible-like introductory work - thank you again for that. As a result of this I was literally able to read it in few days and determine the usefulness of this technology called `xml`; and without having to read 1k pages to determine this. In this case 'Less is sometimes definitely more'.

My favorite chapter was the one covering Web Services and now understand the basic concepts behind XML-RPC, REST, and SOAP.
The only reason I give it 4 stars is a.)its pricey for a grad student and b.)I use Perl, and he has a two or so chapters using Java to parse xml. So those chapters were not useful to me. But hey you can't please everyone :)

Overall, it helped me recognize just what xml is, how it may be used, who uses it (esp. in biology) - and how they use it, and a list of references for more info. Definitely a good little book to check out for basic conceptual understanding. I want to say its almost a survey, but its actually a little more than that.

(Four stars to me means "very good".)

This book is a pretty good primer on XML. I bought it to learn about XML Schemas (XSDs) and XML Transformations (XSLTs). I read about two-thirds of the book thoroughly, and haven't read any other XML books closely yet.

The author's tone and pace are great. The back of the book says that the author is an experienced trainer, and it shows in the book. I have seen many a technical book that talks down to its audience, and this isn't one of them. If you're actually learning the subject and not just browsing, you won't be skimming through pages of fluff. The book doesn't assume that you've read three other books covering the subject already, or assume that you have a Master's in Comp Sci. (Personally I hate it when technical books use words like "orthogonal" or "reify".)

The book's coverage is remarkably broad. The author doesn't seem to have any bias towards any particular language or OS, and presents his examples in every language you're likely to want to use. There are primer-style review questions and exercises at the end of each chapter, and they are actually useful.

One of the ways that this book stands out is that the author talks about up-to-the-minute technologies including data binding and web services, and technologies that are not yet mainstream, such as XLink and XForms. Considering that most technical books are out of date by the time they are published, this is a remarkable achievement, especially for a book of about 1,000 pages.

A couple shortcomings -- the example files aren't available online as of this writing, and I wish that the XSL Transformations chapter more explicitly described how the processor processes a template in step-by-step fashion. It took me a couple readings to get the idea, but I bet that happens with every book that covers XSL Transformations.

I wanted a quick transition from XML DTDs to schemas when I picked up this book. As it turned out, I chose better than I knew. This isn't just a book about the W3C standard XML schemas, it specifically addresses the developer making the transition from DTDs. And, despite what you might guess from the title, it acknowledges that DTDs still have a place in the world of schemas.

After its attention to DTDs and their schema counterparts, this book's big strength is in numerous and detailed examples. Every construct is shown real code samples, often in multiple samples. That certainly helps the cut&paste coder. It's also good for the more thoughtful programmer, one trying to pick up good development style as well as the basics of syntax and semantics.

The authors become overly dependent on the examples, however. Again and again, they introduce some new aspect of schema development, offer a few examples, then stop. Although the reader now knows how say the new words in grammatically correct ways, she is left with no definition of just what those words mean. As an example, the "collapse" value of the "whiteSpace" facet is introduced on p.138 (even though the index says p.137), but not defined for another 400 pages. Namespaces are presented similarly and used pervasively, but their real purpose is illustrated poorly if at all: they allow the same element name to be imported from different schema fragments, but used in unambiguously different ways. In other places, two slightly different code fragments are used to ilustrate some distinction. In discussing "definition" vs. "declaration," for example, the differences are so small that finding them becomes a "where's Waldo" exercise that just a little typographic enhancement could have clarified.

Attention to detail faltered in other ways, too. A few places omit closing delimiters: opening "<" sometimes lacked matching ">", and ditto quote marks. ISBNs appear repeatedly in examples, but are generally described as 10-digit numbers. Only a late example imported from another source acknowledges that the letter X may appear in the last position. Examples with addresses, phone numbers, and postal codes show no awareness of internationalization issues, or even of American conventions like apartment numbers in street addresses, PO boxes, and APO addresses. The cautious reader should study their XML and schema usage, but eye the application content in the most critical way. Also, as noted above, indexing could have been a lot more helpful.

Still, it's user-friendly introduction to the complexities of XML schemas. It addresses the common case of a developer moving from DTDs to schemas, without the impenetrable density of the W3C standards. It also mentions some of the competing mechanisms, including Oasis's RELAX. The book has flaws, and could have in-lined a little discussion of XPath and regular expressions instead of pointing to standards, but generally stands well by itself. There may be better references out there, but this one should get you started.

//wiredweird

Although at work we use Microsoft products almost exclusively for development we have not yet moved to .NET. Despite this it was becoming important to gain a better understanding of XML technologies as some of our projects were begining to incorperate them. I wanted a book that went over XML fundamentals paying particular attention to how they are used by pre Visual Studio.NET development tools. As a developer who works primarily in Visual Basic 6.0 it was important that the book also use that language for most of the examples.

This book covers about 80% of what I wanted. Having read it and worked through a few examples I am starting to use some of the tools within my applications. There was very little information in the book that was not useful in my understanding of the topic.

Having said that there was a major ommision. The book gave very little coverage to how to use XML with databases, SQL Server in particular. I don't think that there was a single mention of SQL Server 2000's XML features, something that is at the heart of the Microsoft XML world. In a related issue the coverage of xml features in ADO 2.x was also non-existent.

In short, the book is full of usefull information for 'real world' developers. It could however use an additional chapter or two on using XML with SQL server 2000 and another chapter on using XML with ADO 2.x

I am already familiar with XSLT and XPATH 1.0 so i found the initial 5 chapters kinda dumbed down. the 6th chapter is interesting on XLINK and Xpointer but only the basics are shown here i wished a few real world implentations were used and i wish they went into XQuery more but i guess that would be another book. starting from chapter 7-12 gets interesting with all the different new functions and types in Xpath 2.0. It was an overal easy read and good for updating your XPath skills or read the initial 5 chapters to get a better view on Xpath. I would at least have an introductory experience with XSLT before u read this book although they explain intro XSLT as they go on. SUMMARY: for an intermediate, start reading from chapter 6.

I'll keep this brief. Most of the reviewers claim that this is either a great easy-to-follow book or it's too difficult to understand for beginners. I'd say that the truth is somewhere in between. It's not hard to follow, but it's not exceptionally clear. Fortunately, the examples are pretty good. Unfortunately, the book is definitely not comprehensive. You'll learn quite a bit about XML and XSL, but you'll have to seek out a more advanced reference if you plan on doing this stuff professionally. If you want to learn the basics of XML, go with "XML Weekend Crash Course". If you already know the basics and want a more comprehensive reference, go with "XML in a Nutshell". This isn't a bad book, but there are better choices out there.

XML by Example describes XML (Extensible Markup Language) along with Document Type Definitions. This book has great code samples and understandable explanations. If you have no idea how XML works, XML by Example is a good beginning to the syntax and structure. Marchal has written a fine book. It has something to offer anyone curious about XML.

I am well grounded in HTML and CSS, but I found the book to be confusing. Most of what I didn't like about this book stems from the fact that there are no exercises, chapter summaries, and the "examples" weren't very clear to me. There is probably a better book.

'XML By Example' is a great book if you are looking to learn XML for the first time or freshen up if you haven't used the technology for some time. Having never used XML when I got this book, I quickly dove in and was able to grasp what XML is used for, what makes it's simplicity such a necessity, and how it is used in the real world. After reading this book you should be able to read an XML document, understand what a schema/dtd is, understand how XSL is used to take XML and generate HTML from it, as well as be able to write your own XML files.

In the 1990s, 2 of the most important technologies were the release of Java by Sun and the birth of XML. Both inventions have changed the way programming and data manipulation/transaction are handled in the world and this book is a great introduction to learn how to use XML in your every day world. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

**** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I read the first 6 chapters of the book in 12 hours then I stopped and gave up from it, because I got lost and confused, and I feel like I need much more than that to know what's there in the XML world, well the book name is learn by example but actually it is not that, it is "get confused by examples", the examples are so easy to look at but after reading them and read the little tiny bit explanation about them if any, you don't know what is going on there and don't know what is the point, don't know why we want to do that, why we need that from the first place ??
I'm not a new programmer but I just started learning XML and I really don't need a book from the very beginning but still I grabbed this book because I thought It will get me somewhere by practicing with the examples,
there isn't enough examples showing clarity
After that I started reading XML Bible 2nd addition, it has a lot of information and it has a lot more details about each topic compared to this book but still difficult to read and has lots of Errata !!!.
I'm still looking for a book in XML that makes me really understand Schemas, namespaces, XSL, and XSLT, Xlink, relations between them and CSS,
I'm using xmlSpy, and there you will find everything there regarding XML and how to make XSL, XSD, Schemas and DTD then the XML files and XSL and XSLT which really need to understand how they all work together but you find nothing about them in XML by example book, I'm not saying the book should explain xmlSpy but you have to know all these technologies to work on XML project.
I couldn't give this book 2 stars because I can't recommend it to anyone. I can't understand why others can give it 5 stars, I don't believe they can do something with xml just by reading this book!!!
In the end if you think you want to start with this book then don't, read w3c.School and get all the definition for XML technologies then get a much more detailed book for it which I'm still looking for.

Ho trovato questo libro molto interessante.

Copre le varie API disponibili per JAVA per gestire file XML: SAX, DOM, JAXP, StAX, JDOM, dom4j. Inoltre vengono trattati anche alcuni argomenti avanzati, utili per apprendere al meglio l'uso di queste API.

Il libro e' colmo di codice ed e' proprio il codice ad essere utilizzato come strumento didattico. Codice e diagrammi UML riempiono tutte le pagine.

E' un libro molto pratico, rivolto ai programmatori. E' necessario avere una piccola infarinatura riguardo l'XML: viene trattato brevemente nei primi capitoli.

E' consigliato a chi ama libri con un approccio pragmatico.

mircha

I'm almost finished with this book, but have yet to determine what its purpose is. There is a lot of code about a lot of APIs, but it is not clear how one should approach Java & XML using this book. I think this book was a product of O'Reilly's "Rough Cuts" program, and it is true the book is very roughly written and all the good stuff got cut. Maybe all the material which would make this a good book is on the website.

I must admit I'm very disappointed with O'Reilly as of late. Their books are going down hill rapidly, and I find I'm looking at other publishers (APress) much more often. I used to go to O'Reilly's website almost daily to see what is coming out next, but now I'm considering removing the Ora bookmark from my browser because of lack of use and to create space for other URLs.

I really wish O'Reilly would get their act together and start publishing some well written and well edited books again.

This edition was published in Dec. 2006, so when I bought it Jul. 2007 it was the freshest book on the topic that I found. There are a lot of different Java XML tools with overlapping funtions SAX, DOM, JAXP, JAXB, Castor, JDOM, dom4j . . . This really help sort them out.

Are you developing with Java and need to use XML? If you are, then this book is for you. Authors Brett McLaughlin and Justin Edelson, have done an outstanding job of writing a book that that cuts through all of the hype about XML and put it to work.

McLaughlin and Justin Edelson, begin with the basics of XML. Then, the authors cover three ways of defining the structure of XML documents. Next, they introduce the Simple API for XML (SAX). They also cover less-used, but still powerful items in the API. The authors continue by covering DOM basics. Then, they discuss the various Level 2 and Level 3 DOM modules like Traversal, Range, Events, Style, HTML, Load and Save, and Validation. Next, the authors examine the Java API for XML Processing. In addition, they also show you how to SAX and how it compares to both SAX and DOM. They continue by examining JDOM, a Java-specific object model API. Then, the authors examine another Java-specific object model API, dom4j. Next, they cover JAXB 1.0 and 2.0, as well as the general basics of data binding. Furthermore, the authors show you how to syndicate content. They continue by looking at a variety of techniques for using XML in the presentation, or visual portion of web applications. Finally, the authors provide some brief overview of technologies not covered in depth in this book.

This most excellent book shows you how to use the APIs, tools, and tricks of XML to build real world applications. Perhaps more importantly, this book offers a new approach to managing information that touches everything from configuration files to web sites.

This book was probably useful back in 2000. Unfortunately, a lot has changed since then, and some of the information in this book is now flat our wrong.

For example the chapter about DOM objects was not updated to include information about recent api releases. So when the book says there is no simple way to serialize a DOM object, that simply is no longer true. You can now do it with the JAXP api.

The book has other problems as well. For example, the section that describes the difference between XSL and XSLT is extremely misleading and not helpful at all.

This is one of the few books that I intend to return

I've read through 2/3 of the book for an XML class. This book did not provide a good picture of what could be accomplished with XML. Nor did it explain steps well. I found myself getting very confused in many places and wondering why the author did what they did.

While the steps are succinct, you do need other resources to learn XML. I was very frustrated with the book.

The book came fast and was in good condition. The price was really cheap too.

Well I bought this book when there was already a new edition on amazom which was not yet released but you could buy it and get it when it comes. I did not know that this one was old edition and that the new one with hundred pages more was on the way. It should be written somewhere on your internet pages near the old edition which would be replaced with tho new one...

This book though perhaps has many errors, it is still one of the best concept books out there. This will really get you started with XML smoothly. Some of the XML standards are rather complex, and I find this to be the most palatable material for understanding stuff like XSD and XSLT.

The book covers the basics of XML, how to define your XML schema through DTD, and then several chapters on XSD ("XML Schema and Namespaces") that include simple and complex types. The book follows up with XSML, usage of XPath and text expressions. Later there's coverage of cascading style sheets, XLink and XPointer.

I think there should be a newer version that will make corrections and update the material. I would love a chapter on RELAX-NG, as this is becoming popular to define schema for XML in some circles.

Overall, this is great book to get you started, and I would highly recommend this book as a quick spring board in the world of XML.

37 errors are listed on the author's site. I think I found some new ones as well. The material moves from the specific to general, so that the reader must skip around quite a bit. The aforementioned errors make learning XML very tedious and frustrating. An edit should have done - it is apparent none was. I have used Castro's books in the past and have never experienced the problems I have with this one. I recommend against purchasing this book and I hope Peachpit will not repeat the problems encountered within.

This book is very concise and it tells a lot about the subject including other topics such as XSLT, RSS, and many other web technologies related to XML. Would highly suggest buying.

I'm currently reading this book and enjoying it very much. You probably would understand it more if you are already a programmer. But I think it's good for non-programmers as well.
Covers a lot of the new technologies that are using XML, which is very useful.

Other than the fact that you can tell that the book was written by 5 different guys because of the the difference in writing styles between chapters, overall it is packed full of information and a handy reference.

I am taking an XML class at the University using this book as the required course text. The authors do a good job at highlighting the key technologies, and the examples and tutorials significantly enhance the material. I enjoy the straight-forward manner with which Hunter and his friends explains what the example code in the book does. My only disappointment is that the book does not explain in enough detail how to use XML technologies on non-Microsoft systems. I believe a greater emphasis on Java and non-VB/ASP/.NET can extend the benefits this book otherwise offers.

(I don't have time for a full review right now,so I will write a few comments and try to add to them.)

I knew very little about XML, so this sounded promising. As of Chapter 8, my general comments are:

1. The teaching structure is often murky. At many spots, the authors don't seem to grasp what a beginner needs to know first in order to go to the next step. This makes the material unnecessarily difficult and confusing.

2. Instead of one example page, for some reason the authors will sometimes create one XML page to illustrate a point, then create another completely different page to illustrate the next point, then go back to the first one for the next point, etc. It's inexplicable. The book would be much easier to follow, and probably easier to write, if they built one XML page from scratch and used/modified it throughout the book.

3. There are too many editorial screw-ups, such as "Figures" that are labeled incorrectly or don't exist -- that is, the text will say "see Figure 7 for the output" and Figure 7 will be the wrong one. I really have no patience with expensive books that don't bother to pay for one thorough copy-editing.

I am currently on Chapter 8 (XSLT), one of the worst-written ones. After a completely unnecessary discussion about "procedural" versus "declarative" programming (I imagine every reader is at least basically familiar with css, and if not, it is hardly difficult to understand "declarative" programming), the book just starts throwing XLST terms at you, with no foundation as to what they are doing or why. I finally gave up and pulled up the online W3C tutorial. This tutorial is free, covers most of the material, and is well-organized and easy to understand. Teaching in logical order isn't that hard.

There is a ton of good information in "Beginning XML", and the information on how to find, install, and use software such as Saxon and Schematron is invaluable. It is a shame that the authors didn't take the time to actually give the book to a few XML novices and then rewrite it as the introductory text it is supposed to be. The poorly organized writing at least doubles, and often triples, the time, energy, and painful confusion needed to learn the material.

Hi, All

I bought the Professinal XML 2nd editon and quite like it so far. However I could not download any source code form www.wrox.com anymore, would anyone help to tell me where I can find a complete copy of the source code? Could some one help to email me one? My email address is wangqunx@yahoo.com. I really appreciate your help.

Written in 2001 it's really starting to get dated with advances in many of the XML and related specs (not to mention new specs). But overall it's a good solid tome if you had to just have one but I'd prefer to have something more recent. That said it helped me pass my IBM developer certification for "XML and related technologies" in 2003.

This book would have been more useful if all pages were blank, then at least I could use it to keep notes. I would not buy any other books by any of the authors of this book it is so poorly written. A total waste of time and money. Topics are presented in a very unorganized manner, there is no effort to develop understanding but rather ideas are presented before being explained. There is too much verbose and poorly worded explanatory material to make this even a good reference book. Avoid this book unless you're looking for something to start a fire.

I am astounded at the vicious, even obscene references to this book! One reviewer was using the book (according to him, "defacing the book") in a class, so this may account for the resentment towards the work and its authors. (It is interesting to see that when I reported the obscene reviews to Amazon, they removed them almost immediately. Impressive!)

In any case, the book is covering a subject that is huge and complex. Furthermore, the specifications for the XML technologies are not static. So it is quite a task to try to cover all of this material in one book. The authors have done a good job of it -- better than most, to be sure. I would say that it would be best to wait to get the third edition that is coming out since this one is a bit dated, but if a reference is required now it is still a very good one to have.

There are many confusing things that are inherent in XML. One simple example is the difference between "Document Type Declarations" and "Document Type Definitions" (DTD's). The authors go out of their way to point out that this confusing issue exists and to help you avoid mixing up the two concepts. We have to face the fact that the XML Specs are tedious, confusing and difficult to learn at times, and should not take our frustration with the subject out on this book! Childish comments like, "This book is boring", etc., are not helpful. LEARNING XML IS BORING! Grow up and get over it! ("Here we are now, entertain us..." Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana 1991)

IBM listed this book as the reference for their XML Certification (141) exam for a reason. I'm using it and finding it to be a very complete, helpful learning tool.

(One flaw I do notice in the book is that it has a definite MicroSoft slant. This leads to occasional errors like this one:
or using type="text/xsl". The type should equal "application/xml". The MicroSoft MIME types are not and WILL NOT be registered with the IANA.)

This is a very boring book. Chapters look like well organized, but content inside is mass and hard to follow. Don't buy this book.