XML Books

If you are like most, your introduction to hypertext was when you used a browser for the first time. You saw how intuitive it was that links were visible on a web page, and how easy it was to click on a link and be taken anyplace else on the web. The great acceptance of the web and its browsers was due in no small part to the ease of use, and the ease of writing HTML pages.

Then after a few years, some deficiencies became apparent. HTML does not separate content from presentation. To do so, XML arose, with its user definable tags.

But XML, by itself, does not take the concept of linking beyond a link being a one way connection between a single source and a single destination. Yet the concept of hyperlinks is much broader and older than the web's instantiation, having been worked on in the 1960s by Nelson and Englebart.

This book expounds on how hyperlinks generalise the links in HTML. You can have multiple sources and multiple destinations. The links can be bidirectional. Given a destination, you can find the documents with sources that link to it. Currently, with web pages, you have to use a search engine to see who links to your pages. And no search engine reaches over 50% of the web.

The book describes the concept of a linkbase: a database of links. It can be stored separately from the underlying documents that it references. This lets you annotate a document without changing it! Imagine the possibilities. The document could be on a CDROM, or on someone else's website.

The implementation of these concepts is through XLink, XPath and XPointer. The authors use Backus-Naur Formalism to describe the grammar and they illustrate it with examples. My only quibble is that perhaps they could have written problem sets, for newcomers to cut their teeth on.

If you want to see a possible future direction of the Semantic Web, have a gander at this book.

I found that the author did a really good job in describing these technologies.

This book is written by two academic and it shows in so far as it is on the one hand a little more theoretical and abstract than most other computer book I read and on the other hand well informed by a large context.

The book starts by describing the different hypertext system that exist and existed alongside with the world wide web. In doing so they explain clearly how HTML linking model came into being and the deficiencies of this model.

The remainder of a book is in part a preview into the future of XML linking (where these technologies are going) as well as an explanation of Xpath, Xlink and Xpointer syntax.

As you probably know, Xlink is still a W3C working draft at this time. Xpointer is a W3C recommendation but neither xpointer, nor xlink have been largely implemented in the industry. This raise the question as to why would you read this book?

Personally I wanted to know where the linking model was going and I also wanted to understand the W3C working draft better. To a lesser extend, I was considering implementing these technologies.

My only objection to the book is its subtitle "A practical guide...". Practical is a relative term. This book gives very valuable pointers (no pun intended) for developpers wishing to implement these technologies but it does not give very practical down to earth examples. In some other web ressources, I found for instance some XSLT code to tranform Xlink into scripting languages that simulate the xlink functionality and to tell the truth I was expecting to find this kind of material here.

There are a whole host of web related technologies or methods or architectures out there. Choosing which of these to use to implement your web site application can be very difficult. The problem is that most texts are each about a particular choice of technologies. In contrast, this book offers a vendor neutral analysis of the main offerings. Which is the best virtue of the book.

The authors explain the main methods for remote application development. Like Remote Method Interface [RMI] or Remote Procedure Calls [RPCs]. Heavily pushed by Sun Microsystems and others during the 90s. Also in that decade was the rise of CORBA and SOAP. These addressed the problem of code compatibility, when a program written in one language wished to call a routine in another program running on a different computer. Alas, CORBA's binary nature and overall complexity was soon revealed.

Then the book surveys the more recent Web Services. This has garnered its own slew of acronyms and standards - WSDL, UDDI, WS-BPEL etc. Just trying to keep a coherent picture of all this is very daunting.

Plus, let us not forget Microsoft's massive push into .NET, to compete with Sun's J2EE. There is much common functionality between this. Though .NET binds you to Microsoft's operating systems, and J2EE can be used outside Sun's machines.

Kudos to the authors for trying to help us through this mess.

The content of the book was easy to understand. Geared toward users with a very basic knowledge of HTML. The layout and format were excellent. My only problem with this book was that the data disk enclosed with the book did not match the exercises. I had the same problem with the Fundamentals book. I worked around the problem and got the full effect of the lessons anyway.

This book offers a company a way to recast and re-implement a lot of its data handling. Surely an ambitious goal, and one that many might be reluctant to undertake. But the book strives to explain how a proper management level understanding of XML can enable these changes. It is not a book about the detailed syntax of XML and its associated standards. That is properly the remit of the programmers themselves, to understand and apply.

Rather, the book aims at a higher level. Even if your current digital data takes on many disparate formats, you can use XML to implement a consistent metadata view. This is stored in XML and at the very least, lets you do rich searching through corporate data. Without necessarily changing any of the latter.

The book discusses far more. But the above can be a conservative approach that lets you gather easy benefits from just a partial XML deployment. Just getting used to thinking about metadata can benefit you as a manager, by exposing new ways of thinking about your company's assets.

I found the book to be written and organized quite well, but the depth of the content and sample programs were disappointing. It is an excellent source of elementary information on XML, DTD, JAXP SAX and DOM; strangely missing is any mention of XML Schema. Also, the chapter on the Apache "Ant" project seems completely misplaced from another text. I buy a book looking for the author's interpretation of the "spec" and their wisdom. I expect to leverage the author's experience and learn best practices; otherwise I would just read the "spec" and save my money.

I'm giving this book a higher recommendation than it may deserve, but 3.5 stars isn't a reviewer's option. If you're looking for an in depth book based on experience rather than summarization then this is not the book for you. Overall I can summarize the book as a handy reference that conveniently gathers the basic information on these subjects that is otherwise freely available on the W3C and Javasoft web sites.

Greetings, all in all this book is easy to follow and has many examples, but lacks a CD with source code. Not to worry, you can download a ZIP file containg all the code. Unfortunatly, they have the wrong publishers site listed in the book. I searched around and found the true link. ... I hope this helps. It's the only way I found it. Other than that, the examples have saved me countless hours.

If you are looking for a book which gives the basics in a question and answer format , this is the book for you . Provides an introduction to XML and related technologies . If you are a beginner , this might be worth trying . Also it might elucidate some of the "why" questions for advanced learners . But this is certainly not a "How to" Kind of book.

Show you how to apply XML in various scenarios. All scenarios are made simple with very good example. Obviously this is a not a reference book for the technologies mentioned. But to start up with those XML technologies mentioned this one is great book. You will able to quickly go through all chapters. I started with the free chapters available in their web site and decide to try other chapters.
Obviously this not expert's voice but a very good beginners tutorials with excellent example. Again I liked their examples a lot as it is easier to understand.
Note - It is not like Wrox books usually with too verbose in theory or too complex examples

Definitely a good book to learn ebXML and its role in the Web services world. Don't worry if you are not familiar with technologies such as SOAP, or UDDI, the book covers it all.

The first section begin with an introduction to ebXML and modeling techniques, followed by the introduction to SOAP. The next five sections go in great detail with topics such as BPSS, ebXML registries/repositories, UDDI, ebXML Messaging, Security and so on.

Overall, covers ebXML nicely.

This book is very useful for any library and information science professional involved in the "new web", that is, the web of XML.