XSL-FO Books

I don't know how many times I have come across a problem or a question that a colleague or I have, but are not able to recall which book the material was covered in. That problem is solved with this collection of books bound on CD. Every single one of the books on this CD are written so well and are so easy to access that if you are looking for anything regarding XML this book is a must have.

My only gripes about the series are that only one of the books encompasses the general ideas of XML. Each book, other than nutshell, has its own detail-oriented way of discussing the topic at hand. You must really read each one (read skim) to really get exactly what you are looking for. Maybe I was looking for more reference type material, but the collection is still awesome.

My goodness, this one is a whammy!! Aside from a hard copy 2nd edition of XML in a Nutshell, the CD contains the complete editions of the same book XML in a Nutshell (2nd Edition), XSLT, XML Schema, SAX2, Java & XML (2nd Edition), Java and XSLT, and Perl & XML. Each one of these books is deserving of its own review, but suffice it to say that having them all on CD just makes it more convenient to carry around. (I already have reviews on XML in a Nutshell and Java and XML.)

Developing a hernia by carrying the hard copy editions of these around is not my idea of a good time, so having the CD takes the cake. Of course, you'll need a laptop to actually be able to make use of the CD, and that'll leech battery power if you don't have a socket handy, so it's a toss-up either way. Still, the CD edition is searchable, so that you don't have to wiggle through the index of 7 books just to find that reference you needed.

All in all, a great deal!

I'm not a fan of Charles River Media's books. They don't have color illustrations, aren't well proofread and just generally seem cheaply put together.

Despite all that, Illustrating with Macromedia Flash Professional 8 is a must-have book for anyone using Flash. Firebaugh's use of Flash as an illustration tool is mind blowing, using simple vector tools to create photo-realistic images.

The problems of being published by CRM are evident though. The black & white pictures make it hard to judge what's going on and there are a few confusing typos and mis-wordings. (he often says "delete" when he really means "cut") You end up stuck having to have the FLA files right in front of you while you read. It's a good way to learn, but rather inconvenient.

I don't want to come off as down on this book just because I don't like the publisher. There's tons of great learning in this book. The source files are set up so you can poke through each step and see how things are put together. Also there are exercises at the end of each chapter to practice what you've learned.

All in all, Illustrating with Macromedia Flash Professional 8 puts you on the path the to do things with Flash you never thought were possible.

Micromedia Flash, now part of the Adobe family, has long been thought of as an annimation tool for web sites. This book stresses that Flash is also capable of producing high-quality photorealistic illustrations. To get the most out of the book you should have some experience with Flash. As such, I consider it an intermediate level book.

This is the second edition of this book, with the new edition focusing on more advanced illustrating projects, covering the new features built into Flash Professional 8, and covering points discovered since the first edition appeared.

The format of the book is basically a tutorial. It starts with simple line art, like you might use to illustrate assembly instructions for a bookcase. From there it goes on to more complex items eventually getting up to what the author calls 'photorealistic.' The images are close to photo quality. As some of these illustrations are quite complex, they are included on a CD supplied with the book.

Using Flash as the way to generate illustrations increases the utility of the program, their data storage formats are smaller than those of many other programs, and of course animation is available.

I enjoyed reading this book a lot compared to the other Flash books I've read. If you are trying to make Flash games and don't know where to start this might be the book you should buy! :)

I bought this book hoping to take steps from mid-level ActionScripter to a more advanced coder. In a world of how-to books that just regurgitate the same ol' techniques this one not only met, but it exceeded my expectations. I was hoping to improve my techniques for interactivity and thought a book on ActionScript gaming would be the quickest, most thorough and most fun way to do it and this book came through big time. Great examples, and good explanations of every step taken. Sometimes I needed more of an explanation but I think that's a trade-off of having more examples. So not really a complaint since I can find explanations online, but good examples are far more scarce. An absolute must-have...as someone said even if you are not into gaming. I'll also add that its still a must-have despite ActionScript 3 being out...but hopefully they put out a new edition covering that.

To respond to the negative reviews: 1. Want to see classes and OOP...that would be an issue if this book claimed to be an AS3 book, but considering it is AS2, when OOP and classes weren't as en vogue, I don't think that is a valid complaint. 99% of Flash CS2 books hardly mentioned classes and didnt code that way. 2. Bad habits/naming conventions...I didn't think so but I think that is a preference and if you don't like his "style" no one is forcing you to continue coding that way after you finish the book. Every author has their own style, and I didn't think his coding broke any conventions. 3. Nothing you can't learn yourself...just not true. I've found a lot of great stuff online, but it was a big help and hugely time-saving to have this wealth of info in one place AND with great instruction...and a bonus general ActionScript chapter that is better than many Flash books out there!

The book provides several examples that progress the reader through the programming of gradually more complex games. The reader should have a basic knowledge of Flash and Actionscript, as the book brushes over beginner-level concepts. At the time, the book is fairly up to date, however there is supposedly quite a jump between Flash 8 and Flash CS3, which uses Actionscript 3.0. Nonetheless, the concepts taught in the book are universally applicable regardless of what Flash version you are using. The inclusion of a CD-ROM is an added bonus and a must with this kind of book.

I found the book easy to read and very practical. The use of examples to explain things is great. And of course, examples that do work is great also!!!

It's the right book for those that already know something about flash and actionscript (doesn't need to be an expert), and want to learn to develop some games in flash, and perhaps aplly those technics on other apllications.

The book is great fun!!!

As a physicist, I looked at the chapter on "Physics for Games". It's very introductory Newtonian mechanics. Applying these in time-discrete form for moving objects in the game. Gravity is considered for vertical motion, and wind is incorporated to affect horizontal motion. Freshman level stuff. If you are developing a game where you need to seriously incorporate physics, there are entire books devoted to it, like Physics for Game Developers.

Though to be fair, the book is about learning Flash and its effects. Other chapters offer code fragments. Of necessity, these are all elementary, from a programming complexity standpoint. But they help explain how to apply Flash.

The most intricate part of the book seems to be when you model a 3d world. Nice rendering examples. Doesn't go very deeply here. Flash almost certainly has more advanced functionality.

Armed with only the most rudimentary understanding of XSLT, I found this book a little overwhelming. It's not a "cookbook", though the examples are good. There are a few places where it seems to dwell on minutia, but mostly it moves along at a jog to brisk run pace. I got a better understanding of the topic and and am prepared to do more research, but this could not be my only reference.

My main gripe with this book is the manner in which the author chose to present the material.

Rather than focusing on "literal" XSL-FO, the author gives fragments of XSLT stylesheets that produce the XSL-FO. This means that the path to understanding the XSL-FO in the examples goes through XSLT.

While I understand the author's point in choosing this presentation (that no one will "really" be coding XSL-FO by hand, but will instead be writing XSLT stylesheets to generate XSL-FO from other XML input), I don't agree that it's the best way to explain the material.

I would have preferred to see actual, "complete" fragments of XSL-FO (both with and without larger context). I can draw my own conclusions about structuring the XSLT that I need. What I'm really keen to see is how the XSL-FO itself works, otherwise I've got no clue -what- to generate.

An interesting book covering a powerful but niche technology. Not a book for the faint of heart, get it only if you want to investigate this very specific topic or plan to do things like XML > PDF transformation. The author digs immediately into the technical details, condensing a relevant amount of info in less than 200 pages; the results are good, focused and well structured, but it's not an entertaining read. This is definitely not a beginner book. A decent understanding of XML, XSL and XPath is required; some knowledge of printing would be helpful too

The book is a competent explainiation of XSL-FO, which is an XML-based language for describing the appearance of text, usually for the purposes of printing it. If you thoroughly read everything, you will understand how areas, blocks, spacing, and the various other technicalities interrelate to one another.

However, the author does not seem to be very good at explaining these crucial concepts for an audience that has no or little familiarity with the subject matter. One can pick them up, but the author does not make it easy. In order to delineate the book into chapters, the author will make a mention of some crucial fact, but not go into detail on it until much later in the book. The material is complex enough, and the author's method of demarcation does not help the matter.

Also, as mentioned by others, this book does often use XSLT transform examples to "explain" XSL-FO concepts. While any significant use of XSL-FO will certainly use XSLT transforms to convert from some other XML format into the XSL-FO, it is not appropriate to offer examples of XSL-FO that are written as an XSLT transform. Having a chapter or two in techniques for writing XSLT transforms for XSL-FO would have been more appropriate than providing examples of XSL-FO concepts using XSLTs.

That being said, this book does cover some fairly difficult material. XSL-FO is very complex, particularly when it comes to positioning things. The information is all there, and it is all good. It is simply a matter of explaining that information in a way that one can read the book in a linear fashion and understand. To gain the full measures of XSL-FO, you will need to re-read the book, or at least the sections on position of elements.

the author says he expects only some knowledge of xslt, but I think that some knowledge of printing and characteristics about texts, images, ... are also very useful if you want to understand this book. If you have this knowledge, this is a very good book for getting into the basics of xsl formatting objects.

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.