XML Books

This is the sort of book that put O'Reilly on the map. Concise, practical, step-by-step, the kind of book that allows you to get significant amounts of actual work done by the time you finish the third chapter or so. The introduction to XML in chapter two is one of the best I've ever seen, and I've often recommended it for people as an XML Executive Summary, even those who will never write a line of Perl.

Like that late 2006 early 2007 meme says: "It does just what it says on the tin."

XML has begun to appear everywhere. XML has long served in hidden roles on servers and in configuration files. Microsoft Word 2003 for Windows now supports reading and writing XML to in it's wordprocessingML format. Unlike MS Word's horrible "Save As Web Page" feature, wordprocessingML, or wordML for short, is a clean usable format. The adoption of XML in a user space as common as MS Word in an accessible format means that developers have a rich opportunity in XML.

The book Perl and XML focuses on the where Perl and XML meet. In asking the questions "Why Perl?", the authors Erik Ray and Jason McIntosh point to Perl's ability to handle text, strings, and regular expressions. The authors also point out in a clear and concise manner the strengths of XML as a means for structuring data.

The book focuses on working with XML using Perl. Tutorials of the basics of either language are best found in another book. The author of the book recommends Learning Perl for those people starting out in Perl. The book does not assume much knowledge of XML, so it's really an XML book for Perl programmers. If you'd like a more in depth discussion of XML, you might check out Erik Ray's Learning XML.

Surveying many conventional XML tools and applications, the book addresses big picture items such as tree processing and streams as well as specific items such as RSS and SOAP. Approaching XML from both a practical point of view and strategic point of view, the author provides detailed examples and observes which strategies work well for handling XML in Perl.

Originally, I picked up Perl and XML to address a couple of small projects where I had to deal with XML. The examples in Perl and XML were well written and provided the information I needed to try out common Perl tools for handling XML. Unfortunately, I found that XML processing in Perl was unacceptably slow for the two projects I had at hand. In a short amount of time, I hacked together a faster solution without relying on an XML parser. That said, I gleaned a great deal from Perl and XML which I imagine I will be putting to use soon.

If you're not currently working with XML, you may find yourself working sooner than you think. I couldn't more highly recommend Perl and XML for thorough treatment of the subject even if you end up hacking your own solution.

I liked the way this book was structured - it was a quick read over a thanksgiving family visit, and it gave a good overview of what XML is and what XML isn't, and what tools are available already in Perl to use it. I particularly liked the middle of the book, and how it dealt with trees and event streams. First there was in short intro chapter on why you'd want to parse XML as an event stream, and some simple modules that give back event streams. Then the next chapter would be a longer one on SAX - the definitive way to do event streams. Same thing with trees and DOM. It ends with some examples of real-life XML processing, such as consuming and producing RSS feeds. The book also has the best description of Unicode I've ever read, and did it with just a few pages.

What ticked me off about this book were the egregious errors in the sampe code. The very first piece of code they show in chapter 3 is a 100-line XML parser that doesn't need any support modules. The problem is that it doesn't recognize any XML because the regular expressions are wrong, which was pretty confusing for me (I'm relatively new to Perl, so I figured they were just "another way of doing it" that I didn't understand). I downloaded the examples frm the O'Reily website, and they're wrong there too - so it's not just a printing error. Worse, the example XML file I tried to test the parser on was also from the tarfile I downloaded - but it was invalid XML! (example 3.4). So I was trying to learn XML with a sample parser that didn't work, on invalid XML! This is not the quality I am expecting from O'Reilly!
(In fairness, both of these errors were in the online errata, but I'm not sure if they were corrected in the 7/04 reprint)

There are other errors in the code too - so be sure and check back with the errata page if you're going to seriously use the code. If they'd run their sample code before printing, I'd probably give this book a better rating.

I have wanted to learn about XML, but I found the pure XML books dry and too theoretical. However, putting XML in the context of something familiar, i.e. Perl, made it much more accessible. This book gives a nice overview of XML parsing using event based and tree based parsers that are available as Perl modules. The book presents SAX and DOM standards compliant modules as well as modules with more Perlish interfaces, e.g. XML::Grove and XML::Twig. It discusses the pros and cons of event vs. tree parsing of XML as well as a few advanced technologies such as database integration and SOAP. The only knock I have on the book is that the examples are a bit contrived and do not show how to solve meaningful problems.

Unfortunately, this book suffers from the same affliction that most programming books suffer from. There are absolutely no useful code examples in the book. Yes, as an experienced engineer, I can substitute my own code where the book prints to the screen or searches for monkeys, but hey, I paid for my ticket, sometimes I'd like to be told exactly what to do. If I wanted to figure out everything on my own, I wouldn't have purchased a book in the first place.

I am reading this book after looking at some other WebService books, and this one is climbing the charts.
All the chapters are very thorough and I am quite surprised that not many people have discovered this gem.
Grab a copy and read it, and you will become a confident and knowledgeable web services developer.

I like this book. It's very useful for a web developer.

Web Services are a catchphrase that many Microsoft-centric developers are falling in love with and they don't know why. Hey, the affair isn't limited to Microsoft based development firms. Web Services are hot topics right now. They provide the best way yet to utilize the Internet for remote work.

For the uninitiated (and aren't we all at one time or another), web services are programs that rely on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to expose their interfaces across the Internet. This means you can write a program and, if you make it a web service, you will expose its public interfaces for anyone to use via the Internet.

This book takes a normal O'Reilly tack of presenting in-depth information that is appropriate for users who want to know the wherefores behind the decisions. The authors present the Microsoft/Visual Studio methodology where many of the tedious tasks of Web Service development are performed for the user. They also do a solid job of presenting why that work must be done by someone and how to do it if you don't want to use Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET). The book gives good information (about 30 pages) covering Web Service Description Language (WSDL) before it covers the incredible facility VS.NET provides for generating these documents. WSDL docs are necessary for every web service you build if you expect anyone to use your program. The authors explain and lead the reader through the process of writing a web service and consuming a web service. They also expend effort on discussing stateful versus non-stateful web services and how to appropriately choose the best methodology for your application. With the performance gains that can be attained in IIS 6 via caching, the assertion the authors make about considering caching during design phase rather than after development is in testing or production struck a chord. The book covers IIS 6's caching choices as well as explaining the benefits and drawbacks of both. I didn't finish the debugging and security sections but plan to get back into the book and finish them as they look valuable.

In conclusion, if you want to mine a book for a robust understanding of web services and the constituent pieces of that technology (with all your examples in C#) then this book is for you. If you're looking to get a 5 minute read and start throwing code (and probably exceptions), pick up a less thorough book. You'll actually read this one instead of just looking for examples to copy. The information this book imparts should be standard knowledge for anyone that expects to write production quality web services.

This text addresses just about every challenge a web-services developer may face. Whether it involves calling a set of services asynchronously (and somehow keeping the client(s) updated of its progress) - or whether it is monitoring, profiling and logging your web-services - this text contains well explained examples of doing a lot of useful stuff.
It has saved me a lot of time - and I found it well worth the price.

"Programming .NET Web Services" is an easy-to-understand text, which simplified all the difficult aspects of XML Web Services (as it concerned Microsoft .NET platform).
At 500 pages, this book is not that voluminous, yet, it detailed most of the essential issues needed in order to utilize all the .NET options which one is likely to encounter on both Microsoft and non-Microsoft clients.
I really find this book useful, despite the fact that some of its elaborations are not as extensive as I would like them to be. This textbook is better used as a daily text, or as the case may be, a quick reference resource.

I'm familiar with XML and have found this book to be helpful. Not a book to learn XML, it is a place to pick up new information that can help to complete a toolbox already in the making. There were some hints to bridge gaps between what I want to do and what I know how to do. I plan to have it nearby to make my work easier and faster.

As a Perl programmer, my first instinct when given some XML to process is to grab the appropriate Perl module (probably XML::XPath or XML::LibXML) and use that to do whatever I need to. Although that usually gets the job done, reading this book opened my eyes to a number of other XML processing tools that will sometimes be more useful than a Perl program. Actually Perl doesn't get mentioned at all in the index, whereas Java gets half a column of entries.

A lot of the book isn't aimed at the kind of person who is comfortable firing up an editor writing a program. Many of the hacks introduce ready-made applications that handle a number of different XML tasks. For example there are applications that, given an XML document, will take a first pass at creating an XML Schema or DTD for the document. This is something that would be an interesting project to write for yourself, but if you just need the schema it's nice to know that someone else has already written the application for you.

One of the most interesting chapters for me was the one about editing XML. My usual tool for that is xml-mode in Xemacs but the book introduced me to a number of other possibilities. The one that particularly caught my eye was nXML for Emacs. Unfortunately it's not currently compatible with Xemacs, so I need to try out some of the other editors that are discussed.

Like all of O'Reilly's Hacks books, this book is aimed at a very wide audience. Some of the tools are Open Source and some of them are commercial. Some of them run on only one platform and some of them will run anywhere. That has the potential to be a little frustrating when you find a tool that looks really useful, only to find out that it only runs on Windows. Fortunately the authors are aware of this problem and make a real effort to present tools that run on as wide a range of platforms as possible. If one hack presents a tool that only runs on Windows then you can be sure that the next hack has a similar tool that runs somewhere else.

The audience is diverse along other dimensions too. There are hacks aimed at people who will just want to save a Word document in DocBook format (hint: use OpenOffice) and at the other end of the spectrum there are hacks aimed at people who want to create SOAP services. There are hacks aimed at all levels of producing and using XML.

It's an inevitable consequence of this type of book that not everyone is going to find all of it useful. But the authors are obviously experts in their field and they explain themselves very clearly. I thought I knew a lot about processing XML but I discovered a lot of new and interesting things from this book. If you want a good overview of the various ways that XML can be useful to you, then this book would be a very good start.

This is my favorite O'Reilly book. The scope covers everything you can imagine for working with XML. I really like the depth of information in every hack ('hack' in the sense of ways to get something done). Whenever a tool is mentioned, there is often additional info about related tools that do similar functionality and why you would choose one or the other. Each hack is like a well-crafted short story.

At first I glanced through the book. It's amazing how people have solved so many common tasks to make working with XML automated and flexible. It's fun to look at the titles of each hack and see the illustrations. I found myself saying "That's a technique that'll come in handy someday."

Then I found myself marking up the tools and applications mentioned that did nifty things that will be good quivers in my XML toolkit.

Finally this book provided some invaluable techniques when I needed to do a few one-time XML tasks. I needed to extract information from a humongous XML file. I was able to extract the text of all elements into a nice tidy HTML page.

Another time I created a tree diagram with custom bullet list symbols for the two types of items in the tree using CSS to format the XML (I'd heard it was possible, but didn't know how to do it).

And if you're looking for a quick explanation and examples for some XML technology, like XQuery, XSLT, SVG, XPointer, XLINK, RSS, some recommendations on commercial and free XML tools, XForms, XHTML, working with Microsoft Office documents as XML or for importing into Word or Excel and many more, then I recommend getting this useful, information-packed and handy reference book.

You'll grab it off the shelf whenever you want to do something efficiently in XML without reinventing the wheel.

If you've ever tried to go to a web page automatically and then parse the information by examining the string you got back, you can appreciate XML. While not perfect XML is probably the most practical option for packaging data that can be read by both humans and computers.

As with the other O'Reilly Hacks books, this one contains 100 hints, tips and suggestions on on how to get more out of XML.

I find that whenever I read one of their Hacks books I pick up something useful that just happens to fit the problem I'm working on at the moment. This one was no exception. Great idea! Great Books.

Nothing irritates me as much as the industries gratuitous use of the word "hack". I won't say more on this topic other than to advise you that any time you see the word "hack" in this book, substitute it for "tip", "task", or "how to". Once that is understood, this title takes on a whole new feel and its usefulness is made clearer.

Anyone not already familiar with XML, its creation and use, should probably not pick up this book. However, if you are using XML documents a lot, the chances are that this book will yield a resolution method for most of the XML file transformation, modification or parsing need you may have. This method, however, typically requires the use of a third party utility, application, or script (a great many of the tips are titled "Do [something] using [something else]"). A quick flip through the table of contents reveals at least 35 different utilities required to the complete the associated tasks - which is OK if you don't mind incorporating "black box" solutions into your environment. There are also many "see this book" notations within this title as well, so if you find a solution to a need, but require more than what the tip tells you, you may need to make additional purchases.

Overall, a good read for anyone that already knows and makes heavy use of XML; you're sure to walk away with something new.

This book is a compact and thorough guide to XQuery. The Jonathan Robie tutorial in the beginning of the book is itself worth the overall price of the book.

This is a good book if you know what you are getting. If you are looking for a focused guide to XQuery practical applications you aren't going to like this book. It's worth repeating, this is not a general reference or introduction to XQuery. This is a set of articles on XQuery related topics. The first 'chapter' is an introduction to XQuery which is actually quite good. After that is a chapter on the history of XQuery. Then there is a chapter on XSLT and XPath, which is a nice, but brief, introduction to those topics. There is a section on the semantics of XQuery which is so thick you could cut it with a knife. The book finishes with two chapters on relational to XML mapping.

If you are a serious XQuery user, are interested in a case study in standards development, or are into relational theory this book is probably worth a look.

Full disclosure: I know all of the authors and count them among my friends.

In spite of that, I can honestly say that I think this book is a very valuable guide to the emerging standard query language for XML. The insights provided by people who are actually doing the day-to-day design, and implementation in some cases, of this language are not available in any other XQuery book.

The various chapters of the book provide overviews, design precepts, detailed examples, and thorough explanations (even of subjects as arcane as the static typing rules of the language).

I enthusiastically encourage everybody interested in XQuery to add this book to their libraries.

A very useful explanation of XQuery and how to use it to analyse XML data. The book shows how this can be done with or without a supporting XML Schema or DTD that describes the XML. The authors explain why this goes beyond a Google-type search. The latter does not (at least currently) know or use any structural information about data, primarily because it scans all types of mostly unstructured data.

But the rise of XML has driven demand for XQuery, to take advantage of this structure. The book also shows how XPath is used, as part of the XQuery implementation.

Another merit of the book is its good description of the difference between XQuery and XSLT. The latter also has been getting a lot of attention from programmers. But, as explained by the authors, XSLT is mainly used on document centric data, mostly to generate HTML. By contrast, XQuery has no such restriction.

Simply good. A collection of essays written by so many well-known names in the industry covering various aspects of the XQuery language from a "A Guided Tour" to "Introduction to Formal Semantics". A book that would be very useful for people with XSLT background, and need more power to do their job. A book that closes the between Relational Databases and XML.

A good number of authors and innovators contributed materials to this book:
- Don Chamberlin (an editor of the XML Query Use Cases, XQuery 1.0, XML Path Language 2.0 working drafts),
- Denise Draper (one of the editors of XQuery 1.0 Formal Semantics),
- Mary Fernandez (one of the editors of the working drafts of XQuery 1.0, XPath 2.0 Data Model, XML Path Language and XQuery 1.0 Formal Semantics),
- Howard Katz (editor of this book)
- Michael Kay (an editor of the XSLT, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery Serialization and XML Path Language 2.0 working drafts)
- Jonathan Robie (an editor of XQuery 1.0, XML Query Requirements, XML Syntax for XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 working drafts)
- Michael Rys (an editor of the XQuery Formal Semantics, XML Syntax for XQuery, XML Query Requirements, XML Query and the XPath Full-Text Requirements working drafts)
- Jerome Simeon (an editor of XQuery 1.0, XPath 2.0 and the XQuery Formal Semantics working drafts)
- Jim Tivy (System architect of the ODMC 1.0 SQL Engine for Microsoft)
- Philip Walder (an editor of the XQuery, XPath Formal Semantics and the XML Schema working drafts)

Even though that some of the chapter in this book will benefit an expert programmer, with a solid background in XML, there are more than enough chapter that will benefit the beginner and one's who are no really familiar with XPath, XQuery and XSLT. The book starts by going over the basics of the XQuery language. The Guided Tour is simply a refresher, and introduces the reader to XQuery and its syntax/semantics. It talks about the differences between XPath and XQuery for example, and the benefits of XQuery over XPath. Small code sections are used to convey to the read the difference of one technology versus the other. XPath and XQuery get a lot of attention in this book as there are lots of similarities between the two as far as syntax is concerned and plenty of difference as far as its capabilities with XPath.
The author[s] dedicate the second chapter to the principles behind the design decisions of the XQuery language. Don Chamberlin, the author of this chapter, write the following mission statement for XQuery:
"The purpose of the new query language was to provide a flexability to extract information from real and virtual XML documents."
It is very refreshing to see the committee for creating XML actually went to the process of defining requirements, design definitions and the rest of the formal specification realization before they actually "wrote" the language. The message of formalism is very clear throughout the book. At each stage of design for this new language, proper documents have been generated (Use Case doc, Requirements doc, etc) that portray a good process. The section on formal semantics adds the following:
"After the Java programming language was released, several formal semantics of the language were written. Some of these semantics revealed errors in the type system, which in turn could lead to security holes in browsers that run Java programs. ..."

XQuery looks very similar to XPath, and this book spends a couple of chapters (a little of chapter 2, and most of chapter 3) to talk about the similarities, differences and influences of one language over the other. The new releases of XSTL, XPath and XQuery 1.0 look very similar since these groups collaborated with each other throughout the process of development. If you don't know anything about XPath or XSLT, and want to know how they differ and hoe they have evolved in the recent years, chapter 3, by Michael Kay, is what you need to read - or may even start with before you read the other chapters in this book. Chapter 3 starts off very easy, but it goes into more advanced topics such as optimization techniques used with XQuery - specially the one's that have been used before with XSLT and XPath for the same purpose.
One of the most interesting chapters in this book is chapter 5 on Formal Semantics. It is rare and rather refreshing to see a language being broken up like that and it's predicate logic and semantics be given in such detail. You can skip this chapter all together, but I suggest otherwise. Even if it is to realize how language processing and semantics of a language work. I would love to see such topic for C++ or JAVA... This chapter is good for anyone interested in optimization techniques and wishes to learn more about the details and correctness of the XQuery language.
Applications of XQuery at they apply to Databases and how it can be integrated into databases are covered in part 4.
XQuery had the capability to navigate, select, combine, transform, sort and aggregate XML data - thus making the integration of XQuery with the backend database very powerful and rather simple. XML data, and how it can be integrated into the database with the help of XQuery is covered in detail and two techniques are laid out: the LOB (large object) representation where the entire XML data is saved as a large object in the database, and the composed representation where each XML element is stored individually.
Even though XQuery is fairly a new language, the authors in this book go to great length depicting the formalism, the correctness, the stability and flexibility of the XQuery language. The chapters that cover Database integration with XML data clearly convey the power of this language, and thought process that went behind designing such stable and powerful language.

I really like this book. We still use Access 2003 at work, so I wanted a book specifically for that version and specifically for VBA. I am already a fairly experienced Access user, but was not as experienced in VBA. As anyone who's used Access knows, you need VBA to make just about anything work. I'm very pleased and have gained a great deal of experience from this book. Very good examples and written well. I'm very happy and use it nearly every day.

A book about Access that tells about the different aspects of the software as this book does is worth having on the book shelve. I recommend this book to anyone who needs as I do to have an available book to give examples as well as explain the details and tell about each area of Access databases. It's not a exhaustic concordance of Access but it has enough info to allow one to build some sophisticated databases. Not exactly for the beginning Access programmer but for the intermediate and advance programmer it would be an asset. I want go into detail but you need to read through the pages to understand the valuable resource it is. If you need reference material this book is for you.

All you can learn to a program MsAccess, as a reference book.

As programming books this one did actually have something I could use and gave an example of how to use it. It even gave the code.......what a thought. Most programming books offer little more than lots of pages of "stuff" you cannot use. The book took you through the process of how to code a "Message" box. This one actually did have a few things one could use. Not a good beginner book, intermediate to advanced. This book coded you through modules.....good idea. The one thing I didn't like about the book was it did not go deep enough into data base design or normalization.

This is not the book for beginners. But this is the book for users who have a good foundation with the basics of Access- forms, reports, and queries- and want to learn how to use VBA to improve their database. I'm working on a project where I need to reprogram many aspects of the database, and this book has been invaluable. I have plenty of Access books for reference, but this book is the secret weapon for Access programmers.

I give the authors a lot of credit for doing a lot of work in building examples for this book. But my question is, how much better is this than the MSDN? Especially since the MSDN is built in to the environment. That being said, this is a nice piece of work and if you are a hard core .NET coder it's definitely worth a look.

The authors continue the exposition of Volume 1, into these classes of .NET. Here, the topics include networking, XML and reflection. The number of XML classes is less than for the others. But they give solid ability to read and write XML data. The XML functionality seems on a par with what is currently offered in Java 1.4 and 1.5.

The importance of the networking classes is because so much of our efforts revolve around the Internet these days. So you can find out how to make a request to a web server using http. Plus classes for credentialling and security. There is even a neat little IWebProxy interface, for getting to hosts using proxy servers.

Under the rubric of reflection, .NET also includes internationalisation [i18n] issues. They call it globalisation, which I think is basically the same thing. There are classes that encode culture-specific data, like calendars and languages. Microsoft has built out .NET with scads of this information. It's a global marketplace for your efforts, right? .NET lets you take advantage of this.

Like the first edition, the book goes beyond being a mere printing of man pages. Each class gets example code that may often be the simplest way to get a quick understanding of a common usage of that class. Plus the informal remarks help this understanding along.

Very well organized, excellent archives, and good source code. Thesee libraries make an excellent reference for coding your application

Excerpt from C# Online.NET Review (wiki.CSharp-Online.NET):
"This book is the authoritative reference to the .NET Framework libraries: Networking Library, Reflection Library, and XML Library. Each type has its own chapter with the following features:

- Header - namespace name, type name, library name.
- Type summary - C# declaration syntax for all members.
- Type description - detailed usage description.
- Annotations - annotations by key Microsoft design team members including Anders Hejlsberg.
- Example - C# source code and program output."

Being a reader of Brad Abram's blog, I had found very interesting the posts, taken from SLAR vol. 1, dedicated on commenting a subset of the Framework Class Libraries (FCL).
So when he asked for volunteers on reviewing the second volume, I didn't think twice in being one of them.
In the weeks that followed I shared my time between working, studying for 70-320 and reviewing annotations and code samples.
I have to tell you: I really believe in the idea of telling us mere mortals the stories behind the scenes on developing the FCL.
Only on this two part series, you get to know why the things were done the way they are.
Since much of the book's value is in its annotations, the Annotation Index is extremely useful in finding comments made by a particular contributor.
I missed the poster that volume one had and the contributions of Jeffrey Richter, Kit George and Anders Hejlsberg. Maybe they didn't have much to comment on the libraries covered by this volume.
On the other hand, in this volume we have great contributions from Adam Nathan (COM Interop), Suzanne Cook (Fusion), Joel Pobar (Reflection, Rotor).
WinFx is coming with all those new shinny APIs such as WCF (Indigo), WPF (Avalon), WWF (Workflow), etc. But don't you forget that they are all developed on top of the libraries contained in these two books.
If you want to be a reference within your team for the years to come, these two books are among the ones to read to pursue this goal.

This is an excelent book. The section about MsSQL server and XML is excelent. I highly recommended

Thiru Thangarathinam is one of the few authors out there who truly know how to teach and convey the knowledge they are presenting. The manner in which he approaches and expounds a topic should be formulated and used in all books. Most books these days simply show how to do the simplest of tasks and never provide real world scenarios. But guess what, in the real world your tasks are never that simple.

Thiru does a great job in not only showing "how to" but also provides best practice tips so that you know "when to", "when not to", "when you do be sure to". These are the things I need to know in the real world. Without a doubt this was one of the best technical books I have read in a while. I will definitely buy any future books that he authors. Glad to see he's a fellow Phoenician also!

This book was very useful. It covered a wide variety of topics and explained most topics very well. I would have liked the book to get into some more subjects a little more in depth, but when you are covering so many topics that is a little difficult to do. This book did cover a lot of the new XML classes in the 2.0 framework. I would have liked some more info on the sql server 2005 xml stuff, particulary xquery. The book talked about OPENXML and even made the statement that you should use .nodes for these types of queries now. But it made no mention of how to do so. Overall, this was a very useful text.

This is an excellent book covering the XML features of ASP.NET. It is very professional but, not for any beginner. It has the first 2 chapters which pretty much cover the basics but, throughout the rest of the book you need to know what you are doing. It is very detailed but is not really "step-by-step" like 1-2-3...It will walk you through how to do something through reading; so if your not one of those people who don't like to read, I wouldnt fully recommend this book to you. It shows a many screenshots in there so it makes it fairly simple to follow along. The book has almost 500 pages that are completely dedicated to the XML features of ASP.NET. If you are willing to take out the reading glasses and read a little bit. Overall, its an outstanding book!

I would recommend this book to anyone working on ASP.NET 2.0. XML is the integral part of .NET framework and used widely on all projects.
Book explains XML classes, Data Validation, XML transformation, XML and ADO.NET, Web Services and use of XML in Web.Config and Configuration files.

Das Buch (in englischer Sprache) erklärt sehr genau die Details. Auch als Nachschlagewerk sehr gut geeignet.

While it's difficult to separate my excitement over SVG from the contents of this book, it's quite possible that the two are so directly related as to be inseperable. Within a few hours of buying this book, I was producing and printing extremely high quality images that I had found all but impossible to produce w/other technologies (JPEG codecs, etc.). If you are familiar with the basic mark-up language concepts, then you should have no trouble gleaning the essential elements of SVG.

After an excellent introductory chapter that provides a general overview, subsequent chapters cover aspects of SVG in detail, such as how to create basic shapes or generate text. One thing I particularly liked was that the author mostly uses a single example (SVG code to create a picture of a cat) to illustrate new concepts, creating a sense of cohesiveness that tied the chapters together. This book is *not* just a scattershot collection of essays that characterizes so many other technical books -- the text is clear, concise, and to the point. Finally, there is a very uselful appendix that summarizes the most frequently used attributes.

Perhaps the only drawback is that if you are coming to SVG from a non-technical background, you might find this book a little too gear-headed for your liking. For technical readers that want a thorough introduction (i.e., not a PhD thesis) to this exciting and useful technology, however, this book is a must.

This subject perfectly fits O'Reilly's "In a Nutshell" tradition, for SVG itself is just that: Web design, including text, graphics, animation, and programming, all in a nutshell -- concise, pithy, simple, and deep.

SVG, a refactoring of several generations of Web technology and a public standard approved by the World Wide Web Consortium, can be authored without any special tools and without any special background, other than the immediately productive background provided by this book.

Eisenberg swiftly, but with diverting variety, illuminates the process of drawing, assembling shapes, creating textures, transforming coordinates, structuring documents, enriching text, creating reusable components, fine tuning color, animating shapes and colors and structures, creating lighting effects, and programming user interactions. All of this is built upon the simple SVG architecture: arrange your elements in a hierarchy and set their attributes.

There is an art to conveying important points without belaboring them and Eisenberg moves from example to example with perfect pitch.

The book also contains an eight page section with full color images.

Some people have complained about the lack of reference books on SVG. The SVG reference is in fact widely available, all 500+ pages of it, on the W3C site. What is really needed, and would have been useful in this or any SVG book, is a five page guide to using that reference -- how do I, in ten seconds or so, determine whether this element can be a child of that element, or if this element supports this attribute?

While I was developing SVG Composer the only book available was Watt's "Designing SVG Web Graphics" (another fine book with a rather different pitch).. When Eisenberg's work came out I happily relearned SVG, doing every example and picking up any number of new tricks.

I do have some reservations: I didn't care for the cat drawing (hated it!) and the final two chapters on generating and serving SVG seemed aimed at the wrong audience (adepts at Java, servlets, and Perl) though the material itself is perfectly fine.

At first I had the same feeling about the appendices, which include brief samples of subjects from programming to fonts to matrix algebra, that surely Eisenberg was misjudging his audience. However he may have things just right -- SVG may well become the greatest crossover hit ever in computer languages, a lingua franca for logic and art.

The book provides a solid introduction to SVG through an increasingly complex set of examples of SVG use. It is well written and edited, it also provides a thorough description of the entirety of the standard. What it lacks is more depth in the area of recipes for commonly used image effects. It also needs more advice about how complex SVGs are organized and built for efficiency. I understand that SVG is still on the adoption curve, so perhaps we could see these improvements in a second version of the book when the standard has picked up a little more.

For the time being the book earns it's four stars by providing a nice learning curve and having high quality examples that demonstrates the concepts effectively.

Not a bad book if you want to learn just the basics; however, I think you can easily find everything in this book on the Web if you take the time to dig around. If you're looking for a book to get you started, this one will do nicely. But if you're looking for more advanced/esoteric SVG material, I'd keep looking.

At last! A book that addresses a key instructional and informational need in the localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n) industries. To date, there is no single authoritative source on the subject of XML l10n and i18n, despite the fact that XML is a key driver behind the growth of the Internet, B2B, content management and large-scale data exchange and will be increasingly important in the future, and central to e-commerce and globalization in general.

Up to now, most writings on XML, that I have seen, are generally non-l10n and i18n specific, and only make reference to these areas in passing, as part of a wider technological discussion. There is development information available on the Internet about XML standards, which includes sections on i18n, but this is divorced from any business logic or discussion on practical deployments within the localization industry. The best discussions I have seen on the possible applications of XML tend to be piecemeal, such as white papers or magazine articles in publications. This book changes all that.

The structure is very good - comprehensive without being overwhelming and it is well thought out and illustrated with code samples and screen shots. Content ranges from a practical and clear education on XML technology, through to where XML i18n and l10n fits into the product development cycle, content authoring and localization processes. Central to the book's appeal is it's practicality and relevance to modern day industry developments such as XLIFF, ITS, online translation, translation memory use and even WML and Flash too! The book is aimed at doing, not at theorizing, and it fills a key gap in the market.

Potential for this book’s influence is huge given the trends in business models and product/service deployment globally over the Internet. I think this book could become more important than Nadine Kano’s "Developing International Software for Windows 95 and NT". It should be on the bookshelf of every serious content development house NOW, nestling up to "The Lexus and The Olive Tree" (Thomas Friedman) and "Translating Into Success" (Robert C. Sprung, Eds.) as a well-thumbed, coffee-stained source of reference for anyone seriously interested in developing and maintaining a globalization presence.

I would certainly recommend the book to all content developers, and translation tools development teams. I would envisage the book could be useful for content authors and developers of all types - DB architects, content managers, documentation writers, ML website developers, etc. Anyone who needs to develop, manage and maintain global content, which has to be localized and deployed in multiple languages.

Yves Savourel has a firm grasp of the technical aspects of XML development - completed by a wealt of experience in the product globalization arena. The writing style in XML internationalizaion and Localization is clear and unambiguous - easily understood by the novice and guru alike, and using terms that are familiar to anyone working in the internationalization and localization industries. The book's content is comprehensive with useful and practical examples, directly applicable to the real world. Thorough, interesting examination of one of critical development formats for entrprise, database and internet computing, the book is much needed! I hope there is more to come.

This is a great book for the 'doers' in the product globalization technology fields. Well worth the money. Extremely credible combination of industry guru Yves Savourel's content with some additional flavoring of content from globalization expert Ultan O'Broin of Oracle Corporation provide a wide-ranging discourse on how to design, develop and build XML content that is multilingual and fully globalized and easily translated. For the first time we see the words "pseudo-translation" mentioned in a book at this level (please take note Nancy Kano et al) as well as the treatment of the localization process as a business activity (and not some kind of warm armpit partnership between developers and translators). Brilliant. I hope the book heralds a new departure in content creation and also attitudes in the internationalization and localization industry - it's badly needed. My only quibble is the lack of CD-ROM with example XML files that we might have used to evaluate our own XML tools and processes with to compare with the books findings.

This book was truly a pleasure to read. A good writing style, a lot of information, and a tight editing job that really makes both the messenger and the message look better. What more could a person ask for?

XML is definitely out there, and it seems to be a lot more than just a buzzword. Finally there is a book that makes it seem more accessible to international markets.

Well, not everything was perfect. But it was so much better than some of the other books out there, that it definitely deserves 4/5 stars.

Yves Savourel's book on XML Internationalization and Localization is an excellent resource and definitely worth reading for anyone working with XML in an international environment.

I found the first part of the book especially helpful, the second part is very focussed on translation processes, assuming that web content internationalization and localization occurs in a similar fashion to software product development, which is not necessarily the case. "XML Tools for Internationalization and Localization" might have been a more appropriate title.

The comparison of translation tools is very long and difficult to read, with unnecessary screenshots showing all samples. A tabular overview on standards compliance and supported features, together with one set of testcases, would be sufficient. The XML database chapter, on the other hand, could be expanded with more information on native XML databases.

Typographical conventions leave room for improvement, including the choice of fonts, indentation in structured example and the overuse of line continuation characters in places where line breaks are not significant.

If you have already used HTML to make some web pages, then this book might be of value. That is, if you plan on adding more pages or perhaps you want to maintain the website hosting these pages? The book talks about how to handle this next level of complexity. The author does not bog you down in the fine details of HTML syntax. Instead, she gives many suggestions ["secrets"] on making a logical arrangement of content. Like giving simple, intuitive names to the directory hierarchy and files. So that users can traverse your website easily.

Typically, most of the suggestions are of this style. The payoff is often easier long term maintenance. Like her ideas on effectively using CSS and XHTML. Again, like with HTML itself, you need some minimal prior acquaintance with these packages, to take advantage of this book.

I'm always hungry for new knowledge as a web designer, looking for that one trick to make my site either faster, easier to understand, accessible, and better. Sure, you could scour the web for weeks, looking for all the little tips and tricks that makes a good website great, or you can get this book and discover it all easily. All from a person who has, for many years, made the web a better place.

Molly's attention to detail, her teaching methods, and approach to giving these secrets and tips makes is utterly easy to digest and remember. By all means, this book is a treasure trove of knowledge that belongs in every web designer's personal collection.

Great book!
Very complete overview and many snippets of experience.
I only called it "in the Rough" because of the paper & binding... it isn't shiney, and no color prints, but the info is the Diamond, and worth much more. As they say, "Don't judge a book by its cover"!
Molly's books are always worth keeping. She delivers. =)

Cal

This is one of the few web books that has great breadth and gives sufficient depth to help not only the novice, but a seasoned web developer. This book has been quite helpful for the web team I am on to understand what current best practices are and how we get to this level.

There are so many poorly developed sites on the web it is great to have a book at hand to point to when needing to explain how to do it right. Molly's book is one of the quickest ways to start building web sites right

To be certain there are some invaluable hints in this book. But since the items covered are just spots of information from here and there around the landscape of web and design standards you need to check this book out in person to make sure you are getting your moneys worth. In particular I liked the material on CSS layout, but I was disappointed with coverage of basic topics like web safe colors, which requires a more in-depth discussion than the few paragraphs presented. Worth the look, but be sure to look before you buy.