Markup Languages Books

A real need for further editions on this book. As others have commented, it's very poorly constructed, poorly indexed and you'll be hard-pressed to quickly find accurate definitions. As other posters have suggested, O'Reilly should be worried that this one got published in this state.

This book is very dry and terse. It has all of the required content but it doesn't provide much perspective of how it should be used. You could use it as a reference, but I recommend the XML Schema Companion before this one.

This book tells you what you need to know. However, it is a bit of a hard slog because it doesn't tell you why you need to know it. It also throws in obscure acronyms and not only expects you to know what they stand for, but what those protocols/standards/programs imply. Yes, you can learn all you need to know about SQL schema, (and more than you need to know - without telling you why you need to know it, you don't know what to skip), but it is a little more painful than it has to be.

This book had potential to be a definitive guide to XML schema. This is not the kind of book you can pick up and read cover to cover (unless insomnia is a real condition for you, in which case this book may help). It is, by no means, a tutorial of XML schema - or even a reference. It's more of an exploratory academic walk of the W3C recommendation and all of its foibles and nuances. There is wealth of information in this book, if you can glean it out from inbetween the droning prose and historical diatribe.

O'Reilly should be shamefully embarassed for ever letting this book go to print in the condition it is. It is replete with errata, typos, and slopped together examples. This book is destined to frustrate those new to XML schema. An uncharacteristicly poor level of quality for O'Reilly.

XML Schema is used almost everywhere (in connection with XML documents, Web Services, SOAP etc.). So I as other people needed to master XML Schema. There is not a great choice of XML Schema books. Specification is already quite getting old. The book is not easy to read. I read it sequentially chapter after chapter and I mastered a lot of basic rules. The main problem now I see is, XML Schema itself does not give you too much of design freedom. Sometimes you need to define a structure (data type) according value of other elements. So now I know mainly what is not possible to do in XML Schema.
After all I have to recommend the book. You have to read it twice. So I have just bought another XML Schema book from Priscilla and I hope I will get to know XML Schema from other point of view.

After taking a beginning XML class where the required reading was the O'Reilly book on XML and XSLT (Learning XSLT) I had become completely frustrated with XML all together. I finally started diving through tech books to try to find something written in English and lo and behold Sams Teach Yourself book came to head.

I did have a current knowledge of XML, but this book shed light on an otherwise dim beginning for me. And the XSLT that is in this book is without a competitor when it comes to breaking down and simplyfing the methods for getting what you need layed out on the page correctly.

This book will NOT give you advanced methods such as MODE or IMAGE includes (which is a shame since these are very important); however, if you need to say, "A-HA" to creating an XML document and linking the XSLT and CSS to the file, then this is the book to pick up, jump in, then jump off into something more advanced.

I agree with the gentleman above (Mr. Sholto L. Douglas). I am 1/4 of the way into the book and I was so disappointed I just had to read the review on this book, which I should have done prior to purchasing it. However my previous experience with SAMS books had been excellent so I purchased it at a bookstore based on the publisher. I won't make that mistake again. From now on I'll purchase from Amazon AFTER reading the reviews.

As Mr. Douglas states the examples are sparse and poor. I am used to SAMS books providing many concise examples, analogies and exercises that aid in your learning. Not everyone learns best by theory.

Since I have never experienced Mr. Morrison's work my disappointment lies with SAMS. They usually put out a better product. I will return this book tomorrow. There have got to be a number of books that handle this subject better.

This is one of the worst books I have ever seen.
If not for the fact that it was bought for me, I would seriously look at returning for a refund.

Unfortunatley all I can do is recommend to the schools that I deal that we dump all purchasing of the sams 24hr series.

This book's index, and references to content is so badly done that it had to be done by kids because not even a computer would foul this up so badly.

Even the content itself is inadequate.
Yes I can learn the bare basics of XML with this book, but thats not much more than getting a brocure or similar info of the net for free.

If I had needed real XML knowledge this book wouldnt have even come close. As it is, its not even sufficent for basic knowledge. I know because I have reference material from my job that was better (even without an index on it).

I am surprised that SAMS would publish should a childish publication... My own 12 year old nephew can do a better job of proofreading & editing than the socalled professionals who did this book.

Those reviewers of this book who say its well organized need to learn to read as this book is very disorganized and virtually useless as anything but a $2 primer..
Ie; Its value is equal to a introductory primer that I have gotten in the past (litterally).

I think the bigger problem is not the author but the editors/publishers,proofreaders, who seem to be incapable of reading or scanning or verifying their own work.

I highly recommend not buying any SAMS book ever again.
Especally the 24hr series. The idea of a 24hr book should be that you can learn the subject in 24hr segments (whether clocktime or 24 steps).


An index that tells you page 134 for a item, but you find instead on page 180, or even the endofchapter stuff where it tells you to grab data from another chapter but its acutally yet somewhere else (a different chapter than specified).

I wouldnt consider paying more than $2-$5 for any 24hr sams book, because you will not get your $ value out of it.

I am happy though that I have been successfull in having several schools cancel current and all future dealings with sams 24hr series... Successfully eliminating at least a nice chunk of profit for 'incompetent editors/proofreaders'.


I do wish to point out to anybody considering this book...there are much better books for the same or better price than this.
Again if you must buy this book, get it cheap, say maybe $5 or less, that way you wont feel as ripped off.

scratching your head so much trying to figure this book out then ENJOY! In 24 hours you too can have all the confusion of XML as you when you strarted the book + be a bald! (at no extra charge to you)

I will have to say if you are interested in reading a book about writing xml code about writing xml code. Then this is perfect for you.

Confused? yeh me too... you'd think if someone spent the time to write a book about writing XML code they might would throw you a few more examples of how the actual code is written rather than spending the whole book talking about the history of XML.

I sort of feel like I could tell you anything about XML; how it started, the cool people who could use XML, I could even tell you what XML wore to SGML's birthday party last year. I couldn't tell you how to write the code sadly enough.

What's good: a quick summary of major XML technologies, including DTDs, schemas, XSL, SAX, DOM, and more. This book tells briefly what each does, and gives some idea of how the pieces fit together.

What's not: there's not nearly enough here to get a programmer going on a real XML project.

This may help a beginner get a quick, high-level idea of what the big pieces are and how they fit together. Don't expect to get any real work done once you've read it, though.

//wiredweird

I haven't clue what this book is about and how it relates to real life problem solving. I use SAX2 and DOM parsers daily and they are an integral part of my software projects. I fond this book to be a total waste of time and money and I would not, could not recommend it. The O'Reilly Book on the other hand it a gem

Modern XML programmers should be using the SAX and DOM api's for their projects, and the related standards. Those subjects should have been the foundation for this book.

Instead the author spends lots of time talking about some "pyxie" utility that reforms XML into some intermediate line oriented ascii format for processing. He even does system calls to assist in processing. If SAX and DOM didn't exist, then yes, I suppose this is how you'd do it. This would be OK for 10% of the book, as an introduction, but not as the primary tool.

To be fair, he does talk about SAX and DOM in a couple chapters. The coverage was light and the examples weren't great.

And no discussion of XSLT or XPath? Nor of schemas? To be fair the copyright says 2000, so this may have been written in 1999, so some of those items were not around or popular back then. But if the book is updated, these would need to be added.

I think readers might do better to grab one of the Java books for now, and try to translate to Python in their head I guess. I agree with one of the other reviewers that there's a bit of filler in the book, though not as bad as some other books.

On the plus side the author is very polite and supportive and would be comforting to newer programmers.

I also like the way he keeps extending his xgrep project to have more and more features; it is nice to see an author show a large project evolving (I just kept wishing it was using DOM).

There are some useful nuggets in this book, but there is also a lot of material that doesn't directly relate to processing XML. The author spends an inordinate amount of space discussing things like AWK, filename globbing on Windows, installing software, and other irrelevant items. The software tools used as examples in the book were written for earlier versions of Python and the Python XML libraries; they do not work with the current releases of Python and PyXML, and no updates are available on the author's web site.

This book proves that a good publisher makes a difference, and that prentice hall does not qualify. I've never seen a computer book that contains so many errors. Combined with the hideous layout of the goldfarb series, this should be enough to keep you far away from it. BTW: i've added a second star, because valuable stuff is hidden in it; you just have to work too hard to get there.

If you're new to python, buy learning python and programming python instead. if you want to apply xml with python, use the web to learn more. Only buy this book if it's *deeply* discounted, or if you're looking for job as a book editor. Otherwise, you'll end up rewarding incompetent publishing.

Very little coverage of processing XML documents using Python - plenty of discussion of Python generally, how to use C language utilities to parse XML, how to use awk to modify the output of the C language tools, etc. The book uses a large typeface and includes examples for both Linux and Windows NT screen input/output (which turn out to be nearly identical), so there's not nearly as much content as you might imagine from the page count. I'm relatively new to XML and Python and I spotted two errors in the examples within the first 100 pages. There are two appendices which sound like they're supposed to explain Python to Java and Perl programmers but turn out to be feature comparisons. That's great fodder for flamewars about language superiority, but not a big help for people with experience in other languages seeking a Python jump-start. People who shell out $() for a book on XML and Python don't need a sales pitch about why XML and Python are good choices.

I think this book could have been saved with some help from a good editor; unfortunately, that wasn't done. I can't comment on the CD as I haven't opened its envelope, as this book is being returned as totally unsatisfactory, which I don't do very often.

I borrowed this book from my new team lead, since he wants me to do some XML work on his project. I have absolutely zero experience with XML (or HTML), and I saw this book on his shelf so I borrowed it, hoping it would give me a clue as to what I'm supposed to do for the next few weeks. I am shocked at how little I know after completing the first two chapters! Each two pages is a new concept - which I think is a great idea. But, after you follow along with the examples, there is no description/pic of how it should look in your web browser! How do I know if I'm doing it correctly if I don't have anything to verify it with? It's kind of like reading a programming book that never shows you what the execution of the program is supposed to look like - that's ridiculous! Also, the lessons explain the "what" to do, but not the "why," which is really frustrating when you're trying to REALLY learn something - not just fake your way through it. Stay away from this book. I bet there is a free tutorial on the web that is much better.

Horrible book out there for learning XML. Lack of imagination on the part of the authors leads to same, mind-numbing, utterly useless example being used throughout the book.

Can use the book for a quick glance at the XML syntax though, but don't expect to learn anything from the book.

No wonder the book sells for less than $2, and is worth only that much.

As with all of the visual blueprint book, this is a good reference for those new to XML. I found it easy to reference with. However if you need more explanation, then pick Microsoft step by step or SAMS 24 hours book.

I'm new to XML. My knowledge is fairly limited. And yet in the first 70 pages, I found at least 7 errors. (And bear in mind, each two pages presents one concept; therefore that averages out to one error per new idea.) Some were "screen typos," as in, the text would say "Type a question mark," but the little line to the screen image points to an asterisk. Other times, though, the information is flat-out wrong.

I'd hate to think what would have happened if I new nothing at all about XML, and just accepted these mistakes as gospel.

Suffice to say, I'm going to try to get my money back for this book.

This is one of the best books on XML. I bought the book 5 months ago with zero knowledge on XML, now, I'm an XML wizzard, got a raise of 7,000 over the last 3 months for my expertise with XML. This is a all-in-one XML book. It tells you step by step about XML, and it's all XML beginners need. A second best book on XML would be XML Bible, which is 1,300 pages. Would recommend reading the visual book first, then proceed to XML Bible to do some fancy stuff.

I found this book useful in getting started with XML, as it was the easiest to understand. It only covers XML and DTDs, not XSL, CSS, Xlink etc. Everything is spoon fed, and it assumes no programming knowledge. Still if you master the contents, you will have a reasonable basic knowledge of XML.

To most of the world, EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange. In this book, however, it stands for Electronic Document Interchange. The author's explanation of ED and its pros and cons are ridiculously simplistic and incomplete. I didn't expect this book to go into much detail about EDI, but I expected the information it did give to be accurate. This error makes me question the validity of the rest of the book. I'll find another resource, thanks.

This is an easy to read and understand guide to desigining and writing XML documents. It doesn't cover the programming half of the problem at all, not even mentioning popular XML parsers for various programming languages. So it's not complete for learning how to build systems that use XML. As befits a "Complete Idiot's Guide", it has a lot of redundancy. Maybe that's so you can understand what's going on no matter where you start in the book. There are some proofreading problems (wrong fonts, missing letters and punctuation, wrong words in examples) which suggest it was rushed out the door.

Everything in this book could be reduced to 20 pages including examples. Every idea is repeated over and over. Someone gave this book a glowing review, and said they finished in four days. A book you can finish in four days is cotton candy. Although the author makes several claims to show "XML in the real world", there is not one actual example of how you could use an XML file (how would you display this file on the net, or import it into Word, or whatever). The only thing the book covers is the structure of an XML file, and that not very well. And while the book trumpets the XML Pro editor, it's just a trial version of a product that the author wants to sell you. You pay $25 to read an ad for a product that costs $150. How is this even legal? And despite the reviews, this editor has limited value. It can help show the structure of an existing file, and can be useful for creating the structure of a new file. But if you create a file with say 20 elements per item, and 50 instances of the item, you would spend the entire day creating a file that would take 20 minutes with a normal data entry system. If you really want to learn about XML, get a real book.

I have never read a book so littered with mistakes. To a neophyte this book must be so confusing as to be totally useless. Can you believe the author gives three different renderings of the acronym SGML within a few pages of each other. Many absolutely critical points are muffed by the most banal and obvious proof reading errors. The final straw is the tear out reference card which can't even get the rules for XML names correct. Really, it's just too, too bad.

Bought this book a couple hours ago. I'm up to page 53 and so far all I've learned is that the author can talk and talk and talk and not say anything useful. This book is extremely painful and I'm not sure there will be any reward at the end. Unfortunately the O'Reilly book on the subject is out of print and this is about all there is ... nothing would almost be better.

I bought this book almost two years ago. Everytime I need to do something in XSL-FO I reach for this book. And almost everytime, I am frustrated and disappointed.

When originally learning XSL-FO, I bought this book because there were not too many options on the market and still aren't many. I felt like it made the learning process way more difficult than was necessary. I read two or three technical books per month and can usually absorb them pretty quick. This book does such a poor job of explaining concepts I struggled for a long time. I am really good with HTML, XML, XPATH and XSLT. I also have a pretty good grasp of print layout concepts and terminology. So I believe my struggle was by no means a technical or conceptual struggle. It was simply a problem of deciphering the author's language and presentation style.

As a reference, this book is even worse! It is just a bulleted list of tags and properties. Most are not defined. Two sentences and simple example of each would have made it useful, but that does not exist.

The one thing that could have saved this book would have been the index. But unfortunately, it's pretty bad also. You can't look up things by concept. You have to know what tag or property you are looking for. That's not of much use. For example, you will not find concepts such as bold, italic, underline or capitalization in the index. So if you don't know what tag or property controls those things you're out of luck. And since the author did such a bad job of teaching you're totally SOL.

I have learned XSL-FO through my own trial and error. I've done a lot of XSL-FO work and feel I have a decent understanding of the subject. Looking back on this book one last time, I can say this is one of the worst technical books I've ever bought.

Minimal examples, very little "big picture" orientation, long reference-style lists with minimal explanation of terms if any, and gives short shrift to how XSL:FO works with XSLT. The omission of fo: prefixes in examples is a an auctorial preference I find particularly annoying. Unfortunately it appears to be difficult to locate alternative books.

I'm surprised so many people have given this book a good review. I went with this book after the O'Reilly book was back ordered. What a mistake. The book might cover every formatting object in the W3C XSL-FO recommendation, but it's more like reading just that, the recommendation (which can be found online).

It's a bulleting of objects with minimal examples and sometimes difficult to understand explanations. I'm giving it two stars only because it serves as a useful quick formatting object reference to me at this point.

Avoid this book if you're new to XSL-FO. Otherwise, if you're looking for a reference guide, this might fit what you need.

There are some exposition paragraphs at the beginning of each topic. Otherwise the book is just page after page of bulleted lists. It's confusing, hard to read, and not worth your time. Read the O'Reilly book on XSL-FO instead.

The book does a good job with explaining topics such as using XML as a database and using DOM to interface with XML. It is also a good book if you work in the Microsoft web technologies (ASP, VBScript), since many of the examples use ASP and VBScript to interface with the XML document.

However, I had to give it only three stars because it is not really a book for people new to programming, as this book advertises. A reader does need some kind of programming basics to understand some of the topics. Also, I think that the book glosses over the basics of XML. Even though the more intermediate topics like using XML as a database are explained well, a reader that is brand-new to XML could easily get lost because not enough emphasis was placed on the basics.

If you do work in the Microsoft technologies, and you want to learn and work with XML, then buy this book AFTER reviewing the free XML tutorial on [website]

just a warning- don`t be convinced by the "free code online" offer- they don`t give you a website, and if you do track it down from the publisher, you`ll discover its painful to use- that combined with the mistypes in the text and its a basket case.

other then that, the book is clear enough, but how can you learn a language without practice?

This book went to the presses to soon. Every example is full of errors. Every example is lacking and fails to show what it is intended to show. To add to my frustrations, online resources are not updated either. There are far too few illustrations. Far too few cross references. I would recommend "The XML Companion" by Neil Bradley, Addison Wesley. Just flick through the books side by side for 10 seconds and you get what I mean.

After reaching module 3 I became quite disappointed. The example in Module 2-1 is missing from the website and there are many coding and errors in the examples through out the book making it hard for a new comer to really learn what is right or wrong. Unfortunately there aren't many books out there for beginners. For a true new comer to XML and coding itself this book can be confusing. Would recommend at risk.

I am currently using this book in a class on XML. It has been used sparingly, thank God, by our instructor. The main book we rely on for good advise and examples of XML is written by Elizabeth Castro. If you don't want to waste your money on a book which is not very clear, concise, or written in a well defined and orderly manner, don't purchase this book. I have worked in the field of computer programming and written in 9 different computer languages, as well as, learning others. Take it from me, there are better books on this subject.

If you are looking for a great reference book to get you through ASP and vbscript DHTML, this is the book for you. It lists the syntactical details in a reasonably easy to follow format.

I had trouble keeping this on my desk at my last job.

At the time, there weren't many books on VBS. This was just about the best out there. Now, I would probably go with an O'Reilly book. Anyway, I thought it was concise and info was easy to find when using as a reference. If you already have experience with using VB, even for just MS Excel and Access (not the full blow language version), this book will benefit you. I just needed a lookup reference on how to do stuff with VBS for the web, and that's exactly what I got. This book helped me to create my first online order calculator for a site that I'm webmaster for. However, if you need more coverage of the VB language, then choose another, more comprehensive book. I think the books assumes that you know something about VB already. If so, then this book is probably enough.

I love this book for what it is: a great reference. Both the developer I mentor and myself love this book. It breaks down the IE DOM into easy to read entries. It clearly states syntax and variable ranges. It has only what an experienced developer needs in syntax in an easy to find format.

Not for learning how to program.

This book is more for reference to VBScript rather than learning VB script. I found the language extreemly difficult to read. It only deals with versions of IE less than 4.5. Not useful for learning or getting examples from, does not go into details in all the topics and explanations are usually not too helpful.

Would be a waste of your money if you buy this book.

The book is actually about how to program in VB for beginners, and the contents about the actual web development aspects are next to none. Examples do not work; online support is poor for that the author changed the online examples without changing the downloadable codes. Not worth buying at all.

I found "XHTML Fast & Easy", an excellent book reviewing basic HTML, covering in detail Extensible HTML, and extending it toward XML. It covers all of XHTML in an easy to read and understandable fashion, shows how it is related to HTML, and specifically the differences between the two languages. It brings together the path from HTML to XML. It also includes a section on Cascading Style Sheets and how they fit into the whole scheme of things. This general instruction book is easy to read, but does have more than a few mistakes that should have been picked up by proofreading and the editors. However, it is a good book to learn about the Mark-up Languages and to understand the concepts in their development. I recommend it.

I bought this book for an XHTML reference and was pleased with the purchase. There was an excellent guide to cascading style sheets too.

Most people would say that this book is just a review of how to write proper HTML 4.0. DUH! Basically, that is what XHTML is. It is simply how to write "well-formed" HTML pages. This book will tell you how to write well-formed pages. In doing so, it fulfills its purpose.

I liked this book because it lets you know about the importance of XHTML compatibility. It also tells you what the differences between HTML and XHTML are.

Overall this is a great book. I would recommend it to the following people:

People with pages wanting to make them compatible with the future.

People wanting to learn how to write proper HTML.

All webmasters.

Well, thats that. Thanks for your time.

This is yet another learn-by-example book. It's geared towards the total beginner who knows neither HTML nor XHTML and wants to start making some static webpages within an hour of taking the book home.
It's not a bad book. It does have a some good coding examples for doing some basic things along with plenty of screen prints. However, for the same money or less, there are much better books that cover all the material in this book and then some.
For someone who is just starting with web pages and wants a starter book that is inexpensive and really is "fast and easy", I recommend "HTML 4 for the World Wide Web Visual Quickstart Guide" by Elizabeth Castro. Once you've gotten your feet wet with a little HTML and are ready for some more details on HTML as well as getting a start with XHTML, you can move on to "HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition", by Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy. This book costs about the same as "XHTML Fast & Easy ..." but covers so much more.
"XHTML Fast & Easy ..." does get you started a little bit, but often leaves you hanging. For example, in the chapter on FORMS, the authors walk you through creating a form with the promise that, at the end of the chapter, they will show you how to collect the data in the form via CGI. When you get to the end of the chapter they basically tell you 1) download some CGI scripts from some website [nevermind how to use them] or, better yet, go out and learn how to program in PERL, 2) even if you really do this, it probably won't matter since most of the Web hosts that beginners tend to use don't allow CGI scripts to run on their servers.
The book is not great, but also not useless, so if it ever shows up in one of the bargain bins or publisher's overstock tables at your local bookstore for five or ten bucks, it may be worth picking up as a supplement . . . otherwise, there are much, much better choices.

This book carries the title XHTML yet speds all of its time going over HTML 4.0, with a few refrences to XHTML standards. The author offers no real detail on any of the special funtions of XHTML. I really think all the author knows here is HTML but to sell his book he threw the title of XHTML on the cover and threw in the basic info of XHTML that anyone could get by looking at one page of the W3C's web site. Great book for HTML but Not a refrence for XHTML.

If you already know HTML pretty well, XHTML won't be a problem. This book gives a good intro to XHTML and is quirky and entertaining along the way. As a Web designer, I found this book quite helpful.

Joe Okonkwo
[...]

Don't even bother learning HTML 4 - XHTML will replace it eventually so you might as well go with the wave of the future.

XHTML for Dummies is a solid INTRODUCTION to XHTML. If you have already reached the intermediate level, then this book is for you. However, if you want to design websites and don't know where to start, then give this book a shot.

While this book is written in plain English and follows the usual Dummies model it is not a start-from-scratch tutorial. The author does not state this explicitly but in order to use this book effectively (because of the way it is written) you really need to have HTML under your belt before you take on XHTML.

This book is written from that perspective and is really more of a reference book for looking up various XHTML elements or rules. It is not very useful as a beginning tool for learning how to code in XHTML unless you are already familiar with the rules and ways of HTML.

Other important aspects like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are given such cursory treatment that it really makes you feel like more of a dummy after reading it. Other aspects such as the relationship between HTML, XHTML and XML are explained in a ways that just didn't make sense to me but then maybe I'm just a bigger dummy than the author anticipated.

If you have a working knowledge of HTML then this book will probably suffice but if you are just getting started then perhaps it would be better to look elsewhere for an XHTML how-to.

Slap "for dummies" on a book and you will get the dummies to buy it. :) This book just wears you out with all the extra chit-chat that really never gets to the point. I have read a few dummies books for programming languages and they are really not all that good because you can buy more comprehensive books that cover everything.

If you're a true dummy (as I am sometimes), this book really is not for you. You would need to be a "dummy who is highly motivated and has lots of time to learn XHTML." You would want to be a "dummy who already has some familiarity with HTML but wants to get to the next level" or a "dummy with an extraordinarily high IQ but low self-esteem or garbled speech or dilated pupils, hence the (misplaced) dummy label." If however, you have the intelligence, the patience, the time, energy, motivation and personal ambition to wade through this long and highly technical (but written in plain language) book, you could conceivably learn XHTML, make lots of money as an XHTML programmer, and nobody, I mean NOBODY, would call you a "dummy" again.