Markup Languages Books

Not recommended for MCSD or MCAD 70-310 exam preparation!

Conceptually, the book covers all of the bases that an aspiring XML developer would require, including somewhat thorough concept, explanation, example, and summary investigations.

Where the book greatly lacks is the code samples; many will not run, and multiple programming languages are introduced.

Don't buy this book for study.

I got this book with the intent of writing a set of custom control to interact with a database in real time over the web, it was probably a bad choice. Though the book itself was very good, I found the content to be a little basic for my requirements. Probably a good starting point from an administrative or reasonably junior programmer's point of view, but not really in-depth enought to satisfy a seasoned veteran =]

I bought this book a few months ago and have used it as a reference several times. Each time, I am frustrated that it doesn't have a detailed Table of Contents or an Index. This seems especially curious for a "reference" book.

Since the HTML tags are listed alphabetically, the author claims it doesn't need an index. I disagree. Besides tags, one might want to look up tag attributes, or perhaps concepts or synonyms.

In summary, I feel that this book is flawed as a reference, and the price seems rather high, as well.

I program and Network I have learnt to do most all that I do on computers through example books. Kathryn Toyer has made a poor job with this book, especially as this is such an easy program to learn. She includes the "example disk" attached to the back page that has examples in text the same as the book. The book is filled with snapshots of examples from the program with parts missing on the command lines. Example the chapter on FRAMES. Time to get through the book and understand most of it, 14 hours.

To be fair, I am not a fan of the Thompson Course Technology books in general. But this is the first one that actually drove me to write a negative review to spare some innocent XML programmer-to-be the confusion this book will likely cause.

Our local community college unfortunately requires this text (a fair percentage of the classes seem to use Course Technology books because of the pre-fab quizzes, Powerpoints, and online supplements available to the instructors who can't be bothered to make their own).

The good: The Chapters are called "Tutorials" and in general, if you can read and copy the tutorials line for line, you will be able to get them to validate. However, you probably won't understand why in many cases.

The ugly: Like most of the Course Technology textbooks I've seen, there are significant typos and the explanations are very poor and awkward. There is little or no rigor in defining terms, the author often uses a tangential example as an adequate explanation for the entire concept.

Many explanations are as clear as mud. Case in point p. 199 (which is only partially understandable to me because I've taken a few computer classes (including C++ object oriented programming) and the concept of scope is familiar to me, even if the word is never mentioned here):

"In XML Schema, any element or attribute that is declared globally has to be entered as a qualified name in the instance document. The reason is that global elements and attributes are added to the target namespace, while local objects are not. Local objects are interpreted based on the namespace affiliation of the object in which they're nested. Because global objects are attached to the namespace, they have to be qualified in the instance document with a namespace prefix. The target namespace applies the document validation through the qualified elements in the instance document using them as the starting points for the validation process. You can't go down the hierarchy and validate only the local elements and attributes."

And that was a relatively clear passage. Even if you understand the concept, you are unlikely to get the syntax exactly correct. This book has singlehandedly caused me to consider a campaign to our department dean to stop using Course Technology books, and search for a decent textbook substitute. This book is of little use in class, and will be even less useful as a handy reference.

1) The author blithely attempts to cover both XHTML and XML in this book, and does an absolutely horrible job; He tries to cover too much in one text which in my opinion, does a great disservice to the reader. **LOL it's like talking to someone who claims to be an expert in several topics, yet knows only vague generalities which anyone can pick up within five minutes of reading at their local bookstore**

2) Lots of time is spent discussing very (basic) HTML tags; might I suggest the visual quickstart guide (5th edition or higher) from Elizabeth Castro.

3) If one is serious about learning the ins and outs of XML and all of its technologies, (XSLFO, DTD's, XSLT, XHTML, XML Schema, etc) might I also suggest "XML Family of Specifications"...its a very dense text, chock full of information, challenging at times, but worth every penny.

The book is very weak in content and has absolutely no practical examples. I'm not an expert in XML, so I won't give a technical estimate, but with new technology like XML one should not only show his favorable opinion, but provide examples to prove it's value. Title is also very misleading - in fact you've got a combination of 'appreciating the need of xml' and XML short description.

I had to buy this book for a classs I was taking and I wish I could've returned it instead of using it. To give the book some credit, the explanations are easy to understand and the author gives good examples. However, the codes he gives are useless, because most of them are spelled wrong. For a coding that relies on accuracy, this book should have been edited better. My suggestion: Find a different book to teach yourself CSS and XHTML. Pretty much anything would be better than this book.

This book presents some good, simple information. The screen shots are nice except they are hard to read if you want to try to recreate them on your own. My biggest objection to the book is its use of XMLSpy as an application of creating the XML. XMLSpy, as the book indicates, is very expensive and not at all necessary for successfully completing an exercise in xml. This is particularly true for such an elementary book as this.