XML Schema 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!

Excellent choice for international implementation. Far exceeds other options in guidance materials. Worthy of the 50 bucks, and will continue to serve as a valuable reference to my employees.

If you are implementing XML internationally you need this book. I normally don't like "textbooky" kinds of books but in this case, the practicality of this book was really helpful. The chapter on Architectural Best Practices is really good.

ASN.1 is an abriviation of Abstarct Syntax Notaion One.
ITU is also publishing ASN.1 from ITU web as below.

X.680 Information technology - Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1): Specification of basic notation
X.681 Information technology - Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1): Information object specification
X.682 Information technology - Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1): Constraint specification
X.683 Information technology - Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1): Parameterization of ASN.1 specifications
X.690 Information technology - ASN.1 encoding rules: Specification of Basic Encoding Rules (BER), Canonical Encoding Rules (CER) and Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER)
X.691 Information technology - ASN.1 encoding rules: Specification of Packed Encoding Rules (PER)
X.692 Information technology - ASN.1 encoding rules: Specification of Encoding Control Notation (ECN)
X.693 Information technology - ASN.1 encoding rules: XML Encoding Rules (XER)
X.694 Information technology - ASN.1 encoding rules: Mapping W3C XML schema definitions into ASN.1
X.695 Information technology - ASN.1 encoding rules: Registration and application of PER encoding instructions

These documents are freely downloaded from ITU web.
Sometimes newest documents needs some payments.

This book was very helpful in getting me up to speed with XML Schema. It was written well and I have provided the added detail I needed to go above and beyond up at work. Priscilla's Walmsley's extensive experience is conveyed well in the book and has proven to be a great resource.

Walmsley's book is the one I go to as the reference for W3C Schema. It is clear and very accurate and reliable. I find the examples relevant and helpful.

I had to chuckle at a previous review that couldn't understand why something was found in multiple places. Well perhaps it is used in several places. I would be happy that the index was thorough. Schema is a somewhat complicated language but Walmsley provides transparency and order.

I recommend this book to my clients and in classes I teach on XML and Schema regulalrly.

Since all other reviews are very positive, I'm here to offer a different opinion.

I've had this book for over a year now, and I barely use it. Each time I attempt to find something useful in it, the information is scattered over the entire book making it extremely difficult to understand.

For example, right now I'm looking up the "ref" attribute, and according to the index, it appears on 7 different locations throughout the book, each portion shorter than 1 page. Also, I have seen many tables scattered throughout with exact same information, or one or two differing field values, making it very confusing to understand which table is doing what.

And at over 500 pages long, there is a large amount of filler information in this book.

Is this book "definitive"? It looks like it is. Is this book usable? Absolutely not. This is one of the worst investments I've made in computer books.

And there is a place about strings in the book where it differs from the official W3C specs.

XML Schema can be really confusing but this book has made it much more clear to me. In particular, I muddled through my project never really understanding things like namespaces and elementFormDefault and weirdnesses like why complex types can have simple content, until I decided to sit down and read this book. Now I feel like I've got a handle on how these things work, plus it made me realize that XML Schema has a lot more features I didn't even know about. The chapter on extensibility was a bonus because it compared and contrasted some of these advanced features and gave me a better idea when to use them. The index is good, too - which makes it easy to use as a reference.

Imagine yourself sitting in front of the formal w3c standard(s) and trying to read it cover to cover...

I tried that and it is very hard, boring, and very unproductive.

Now, try to read it with this book as a companion -- you will find yourself understanding everything on the spot.

There are a lot of useful examples and explanations which are (in my opinion) missing from the standard's text. This is what makes this book so useful.

Also, the organization of the book makes it very easy to locate information you need and to use it as a reference book.

Trying to understand the fine details of the XML Schema standard and the capabilities of XML Schema? Trying to implement an XML parser or an XML validator? If so -- you will probably appreciate this book and will probably use it a lot!

Even now, several years later, I sill find it useful and revealing.

Hurrah! Microsoft has said for several years that it strongly supports XML. Well MS Office 2003 is one of the first major products that conforms to this. As you probably know, earlier versions read and wrote to Microsoft's own doc format. A binary format. Third party developers then had to write code to read and write files in this format. Doable, but certainly an aggravation to some, given the complexity of the format.

Which is why MS Office 2003 was eagerly awaited. Now, XML is a fully supported data format. It also lets you see in an easy and direct way the complexity of deciphering the doc format, if you had never tried to do that firsthand.

Here, the book walks you through the various XML outputs and their associated schemas. There is the usual XML verbosity. (No surprises here.) But you can now read, in plaintext, how the suite structures its code in an OO fashion. So much nicer!

Not that the book is trivial. Many examples show how a lot of XML's capabilities are used. Like namespaces, XSLT, XSL and XPath. A reassuring point is that your needs might not have to extend to all these usages. The book also has many very simple XML examples that could be germane.

This book provides a good overview of Microsoft's Office XML formats. In addition to covering these formats, it also provides some useful material related to Microsoft Office smart documents, an extension mechanism for Microsoft Office applications.

Note: Microsoft Office XML is completely distinct from the Open Office.org XML format (OASIS OpenDocument) which is not covered in this book.

Clear, concise, and packed with practical knowledge. I work with XML, XSLT, and C# for a living, and this book had me using XSLT to whip up WordprocessingML documents in no time. I especially appreciated learning how to turn off the default "Word" display of ML documents in Internet Explorer. I'm also using Evan's great XSLT that mimics Word's "data-only" output format-- as part of a process to validate foreign tag sets in WordML documents. Thank you!

This book answers a very specific need - you are working with the new Office xml formats. If you are directly reading or writing WordML, SpeeadsheetML, or the other xml formats - stop what you are doing, buy this book, and read it. It will put you miles ahead.

Clear, concise, and about as complete as it can be with Microsoft's incomplete documentation to work from. I had it open on my desk next to me the whole time I was working with these file formats.

It has some stuff for InfoPath and Office WebServices. I didn't read those part but the rest is so well written I would bet that part is indespensible too.

I've read the Addison Wesley book on Microsoft's new Office XML standards and this book is much much better. The book covers four applications; Word, Excel, Access and Infopath. It covers both the storage XML format for Word and Excel, as well as the use of XML within Word and Excel itself from the end-user side. The coverage of the storage format is excellent, and that, being a developer, is something I can appreciate.

For end-users of Word and Excel who are just looking to consume XML in your document or spreadsheet, or to mine XML using Infopath, this is a well written book that is worth your money and you can ignore the technical segments. For engineers looking to work with the new Microsoft XML storage formats you will find a lot to like here, and you may just find some cool things to do with XML to do on the forward facing end-user side of the house.

To give a brief background about myself. I have been one of the primary contributor and committer of the Web Tools Platform (WTP) eclipse tools project since its inception through WTP 1.5 release. I contributed the Validation Framework component for this project. I read a large portion of this book and can say that this most comprehensive book that explains the complete WTP in a step by step fashion that can be help you easily understand the whole WTP project, its sub projects, its components and features through several real world examples. I strongly recommend this book to all users and contributors of WTP.

Vijay Bhadriraju, IBM

Eclipse Web Tools Platform: Developing Java(TM) Web Applications

This is an excellent book; I specially liked the iterative approach (for example, for presentation tier, iteration 1: HTML, iteration 2: add CSS, iteration 3: add Javascripts, iteration 4: XML and XSLT, iteration 5: DTD)authors have taken. I have used examples from this book, with Eclipse and NetBeans, of course for Eclipse user this book has added value, since it goes through configuration of Eclipse and recommended practices. Please ignore the gripe about errors in the code; there are two minor errors which are detailed in the errata on book's companion site, it doesn't take more than a minute to fix those two issues.

Authors discuss All three tiers in great detail. How about this, by page 85 you would be deploying a simple web service (and you would be amazed how simple it is).

Though I have had some experience in Java, Eclipse, and WTP, a recent project required me to get more into depth. This book got me through the whole development process. It explained to me clean coding techniques when writing web apps in Java, how to get my web server up and running for use with WTP, to get my apps to talk to the server, debugging using different tools, and unit testing in a web environment.

This book was an invaluable addition to my collection, and is also a great reference now that I have mastered these concepts.

It is quite ironic how the authors state on p.8 that they "have taken great care to ensure that all source code listings actually work", when already by page 82 I have dug myself out of some MANY bugs in the code, that it makes me just dizzy thinking about what the next 600 pages are going to bring!

Perhaps I am a bit harsh on the 2/5 rating...

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).

This isn't a "textbook" of xml -- if you want a guided introductory tutorial, look elsewhere. But if you're anything like me, once you've got past the intro stage, you need a good memory-jogger and "explain-that-to-me-quick-just-one-more-time" resource at your side while you're working on a project. That's what this book provides, and it does it brilliantly, insightfully, and without the endless, distracting and generally useless drivel of many xml books. The explanations unfailingly come right to the point, and it's rich with short, helpful examples. It's obvious the authors have really developed in the real world! There is no book on my xml shelf that gets more use (and collects less dust) than this one. Buy it and you'll be glad you did. (I'm on my second copy!)

XML: the grab-bag, so-what-you-will, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, there-are-rules-strict-rules-(sort-of) technology that bends you to its will as much as you can bend it to yours. And this book is a decent round-up of the most common, widely-deployed implementations -- with enough general knowledge to help you sort through the more specific ones (or help you in creating your own).

A better title for it might have been: "XML: A Developer's Almanac". (Which, I suppose is a good-enough alternative title for any book in the O'Reilly "Nutshell" series.)

This book claims to be your only needed guide in XML and related topics. It covers almost all you can imagine. I liked it very much and glad, that I have a book, that I can use like XML reference.
I have just nothing to say about this book except it contains ALL information one can need on XML.

O'Reilly's XML IN A NUTSHELL is, like all entries in the Nutshell series, a desktop quick reference. It provides concise information about nearly all matters of XML, and is split into roughly four parts. The first introduces XML, the concept of tags, well-formedness, Unicode, DTD's and schemas, namespaces, and so forth. The second provides an overview for the many formats that are built upon XML, such as XHTML, XSL:FO, Docbook, etc., and technologies that plug-in into XML, namely XSLT, XPath, XLinks, XPointers, XInclude, and CSS. The fourth covers DOM and SAX, the APIs for dealing with XML. Finally, the book ends with a "Reference section" for various technologies covered earlier in the book, structured much like O'Reilly's pocket guides. I found the Reference section somewhat inconvenient, it causes flipping back and forth when each section could have been simply integrated with the previous discussion of the relevant technology earlier in the book. Furthermore, the book ends with a long series of Unicode character tables, which are of limited utility, as they cover only a portion of Unicode, which has already expanded in the time since, and these tables simply bloat the book a little.

This third edition is especially admirable for its advocation of schemas, whereas many other XHTML publications would mention only DTDs.

XML IN A NUTSHELL is emphatically not a tutorial for XML, in spite of the friendly introduction to the markup language that opens the book. For each of the technologies mentioned herein, you'll want a separate book. For XPath especially, O'Reilly's XPATH AND XPOINTER is worth getting. XML IN A NUTSHELL instead provides only a quick reference for matters the reader is already acquainted with. Now, much of this quick reference information can be freely had on the Web. I'd recommend the book only to those who are fortunate enough to have someone else cover their book expenses, or can get it from their library, or those who simply adore print documentation.

This book is by far the best book I've read on XML. Typical of O'Reilly "In a Nutshell" books, the converage of XML is fast paced and complete. Your money will be well spent on this book. I even think most beginners will do well with this one!

I took this book as it was a recommended book for one my courses.. i thought it would be same as other text books, where you actually LEARN THRU THE BOOK..

But this book is STRICTLY for a reference purpose.. I had to take another book to learn the basics of XML.. also, the net tutorials helped a lot..

Though, as a reference book, I'll give full points to it.. once you have the basic knowledge about XML, you can really use this book to its optimum level, and it really helps you to refer ALL the types in XML..

So if you are starting to learn XML, I would advise to take a simpler book, like "XML Applications" and go through the net too.. but once you are done with the basics, buy this book the very next day, and check out what all wonders you can do through XML!!!...

This is a nice XML Schemas book. It goes through the material thorougly with examples. It also brings up case-scenerios that help one think about tackling the projects we are likely to encounter (or in my case currently encountering) in our XML doings.

Although there are some typos they do not glare the fine material in this book nor hinder learning.

The book helped me preparing for the IBM certificate for XML (IBM certified solution developer - XML and related technologies), thank you...

I had to create an XML schema out of an XML file that was already existing (I am sure that rarely happens:-)) and I could get the job done by reading half of this book. Would be a five star if not for the typos.

This is a much better way of learning to write XML schemas compared to formal language at the XML schema specification site.

The book does not cover very good examples on each topic specially on Datatypes. Also it is not exclusive on detailing schemas. The kind of material/information provided by this book can be read from any core xml book. XML Bible describes the Schemas very well in one chapter.

This book is worth the price for its discussion of modeling documents vs modeling data. Coming from the document world, I have found relational database types have a hard time understanding the "model" of a document schema. This book explains the document analysis process concisely, but clearly. If you work in a place that is trying to bring the document and database worlds closer together, this book is helpful.

Thom Robbins' PROGRAMMING MICROSOFT INFOPATH: A DEVELOPER'S GUIDE appears in its updated second edition to cover the latest InfoPath solutions in the MS Office system. It updates the former book to cover all new features and options as they work with Service Pack 1, provides updated examples and insights, and will reach practicing developers with the latest forms and options which can be customized to meet user needs.

This is an intermediate level book aimed a the programmer/developer who is setting up a distributed application using InfoPath. If you are an InfoPath end user, this is not the book for you. If you are just starting out as an InfoPath developer, then this is the place to start.

The book begins with a bit of history and description of the basic structure of the Microsoft .NET framework, Service Oriented Architecture, and its integration into Microsoft Office.

From there it goes into the InfoPath IDE and you're off and running. The book is somewhat tutorial in nature, with screen shots showing how to do things. It also has some of the characteristics of a reference book with descriptions organized by subject rather than going through in a straight tutorial format.

This is the second edition of this book and it covers all of the changes and updates included in Service Pack 1. There is a CD with the book that includes all of the source code, figures, and projects from the book. The writing is clear and to the point. This is a good introduction to the subject.

This book really doesn't teach you much of anything - it tells you about things, it describes concepts - but there is very little step-by-step information. If you are looking for tutorial type materials, this isn't it. If you are looking for books to supplement tutorial type materials, this is very likely your book.

InfoPath is a new component of Microsoft Office that serves to implement Microsoft's vision of how Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Internet Information Server, VisualStudio.NET, Windows, SQL Server all tie together in the basic .NET environment to make an integrated business environment for the sharing of data within an organization.

Mr. Robbins is a Senior Technology Specialist with Microsoft. He appears to be an evangelist for the .NET, Web Services, XML and certainly the InfoPath approach. In this book he presents a complete introduction to InfoPath from describing what it is supposed to do, to using it's IDE to produce some intergrated solutions.

The book is said to be of beginner to intermediate level. This means beginner only so far as InfoPath is concerned. The book presumes you have a good understanding of especially Office 2003, the .NET Framework, and Visual Studio.NET 2003. You also need some knowledge of the other packages listed at the beginning. Finally, this is a book designed for the applications developer, not the end user. Consequently some programming experience may not be an absolute requirement, but a little .ASP, SQL, HTML knowledge wouldn't hurt.

This is the hands down best book on InfoPath for the developer that's been published so far.

"Programming Microsoft InfoPath" is a great place to start.

The book covers how to get started and how InfoPath fits into the software developer's toolbox, from Form design thru security, and integration with SharePoint/BizTalk.

With this book and a little practice, I was able to start creating practical "Smart Client" applications on the first day.

Pat Tormey PE
Foursquare Solutions