XML Books

I found this book to be an excellent introduction to XML and the XTeam, as the book calls it, but in reading it I realized that the book is only just an introduction to a much broader world. I think that it is perfect for beginners, and does a good job of steering you in all the directions you can go with future studies.

Some things to consider...although the author does not assume you have any previous knowledge in Web development, I don't think it would be possible to comfortably pick up on XML without knowing HTML and XHTML and the CSS knowledge that you should have when learning XSLT. As far as covering XSLT, you should definitely buy another book for that because XSLT mastery is beyond the scope of the book.

It is well-written and flows good. The way the book is written is so that you don't have to flip when using it as a reference. So, if you read it cover-to-cover, information repeats itself. If you do have experience with Web languages you might feel like you are getting too much information, but it is worth reading through to find those lesser known bits and pieces of info. The author is thorough with the material he decides to cover, enough so that you can intuitively plan your own code rather than simply emulate examples. Overall, I would say the book has definitely given me a great appreciation for XML, and I want to take it to new levels.

Before reading the book, I was knowing nothing about XML, but after reading a few chapters, I got familiar with the technology.
The book is good for XML first timers, also if you know a little bit about it, but it's not enough if you need to be professional.

Though the book covers material quickly and lucidly, the editing is very sloppy and key details are omitted. For example, in discussing using the ID datatype for attributes in DTDs, it omits a key detail: a number isn't an XML name, and to get around this, prepend an _. The example given even shows a useage that won't work! The O'Reilly book of a classmate included this. Elsewhere the text discusses examples that aren't in the book and seem left over from a previous edition, and reading the text is distracting for the grammatical errors.

In general it appears that the book was thrown together in a big hurry, which is a shame, as it's a very likeable book and would be great if the information was correct.

The author's have done an outstanding job in writing the book. I found that even the mundane details were covered in the right place and with a little humor. The coverage starts out very simple, so many people won't use the beginning chapters extensively. However, as the book progresses, the coverage becomes more technical and I think that most people will find the authors have covered most of the XML details that any developer will need. The authors also discuss some of the details that other books leave out, such as the default namespaces. Little bits of information like this make the difference between a book that merely teaches and one that really helps. This book has something for everyone. Novices will get the most out of the book, but even advanced readers will receive some benefit. The thing I like the best is that the book is arranged as a quick reference--something that makes it especially useful when you're trying to complete a project and need to know some detail you've forgotten.

A book about XML and distributed systems, published during 2002, and no discussion about XML Web services?? Makes me wonder how old the content is. I am an experienced architect and developer on different platforms and I found this book completely useless.

The author obviously is a creative and intelligent person and his work presents several fantastic ideas and concepts. However, his writing style is almost stream-of-consciousness. The nuggets of true value in this book must be gleaned from excessively wordy paragraphs and multiple tangents to explain trivialities. The result is that beginners will likely get lost or confused, while the experienced reader will get bored. I would love to see a second edition of this book wherein the content has been edited by an experienced technical editor to clean up the verbiage and make the book more concise and clear.

I am in consultancy field from past several years and got my hands on this book last week. It's good. I agree that this is a lasting work, with collection of ideas for applying XML to everything (well almost). I have also done lots of XML work and usually go through almost all the books on the subject, but this one has some extra value. I liked the explaination, which serves both for beginners and advanced modelers. I am also an architect for several systems and was quite impressed with the model presentation. Another important and good thing is that this book does not insist that you know lot about customary UML knowledge. The schematics are simple and easy to grasp for anyone.
You can have this book even on the road, and I promise it would add value to whatever you know about this subject. I would suggest to buy this book for sure.

I am a chief architect in consultancy business. I have probably read all XML books released so far and closely looked at all of them. But there wasn't any book on design and modeling. This book is definite go for beginners and experienced architects. It explains the concepts and basics of systems modeling, from XML point-of-view. Good job by the author, as he had explained the core concepts of using XML. This book does not have much of code, but I guess there are enough books on coding aspect. This book deals primarily with application of XML to systems. The chapter on open-system is outstanding and is the part I liked most. I also teach part time and have suggested this book for XML reference and tutorial. The good thing about this book is that it tries to create ideas of applying technology and does not play with toolkits and programming. I believe coding and system architect belong to two different domains. The book also shows some case studies of interest, which are supported by interfaces - good!! I would definitely suggest to buy this book, a good one!!!! :-)

You probably know that XML is descended from SGML, and it thus inherited DTDs, which were then the only means of specifying a document model. That proved adequate for SGML, but its limitations soon became clear in XML. Several alternatives were proposed, but XML Schema seems to be winning. Thus Bradley has delivered a timely exposition. He covers all the features clearly. A brief mention is made of its competitors, Relax NG and Schematron. But they do seem to be fading fast.

The most interesting part of Bradley's text are the chapters on namespaces. Other aspects of Schema are lower level and, while useful, are frankly mundane. By contrast, namespaces are the critical feature of Schema. They let you build on pre-existing schemas that have been published on the web. And you can publish your schemas so that others might benefit. You and those in your field or industry can cooperatively derive a net gain by agreeing and publishing standard definitions. A Network effect.

I assume that you are familiar with HTML. In that, the crucial element are the hyperlinks (the href and src attributes in certain tags). It is these that put the "H" in HTML. Without them, HTML just becomes a limited page markup language. It is that ability to link to arbitrary locations on the Internet which produced the Web. Likewise, in the much heralded Web Services, these exchange data via XML. Which in turn depends on XML Schema to build consistent hyperlinked semantics.

You should read Bradley's chapters on namespaces thoroughly.

I purchased this book based upon recommendations listed here on Amazon. I should have looked elsewhere for reviews. This book is absolutely unreadable. The author jumps from topic to topic and then back that it makes my head spin. He refers to future chapters, future concepts, and external resources to distraction.

Specifically, in the midst of discussing simple element constructions, Mr. Bradley includes a paragraph describing television stations in the UK that has no relevance to the examples given. I'm sure he's proud of his heritage and his expertise on television in England, but what does it have to do with XML Schemas or the current example????????

I suspect that Mr. Bradley is a college professor. If he is, he should be forced to sit through recordings of his own lectures. Maybe that would cure him of his unbearable writing style.
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Neil Bradley in his fourth book tells you everything you would ever want to know about XML Schemas or better knows as XSD for XML Schema Definition. With the popularity that various XML technologies are attracting these days, every developer, architect and designer needs to know what XML Schema is and how it used. This topic is covered in many other books, but Bradley's book has by far the most extensive, comprehensive and thorough coverage of the topic. It shows that author truly understand the topic at hand, and can convey the message clearly to the reader. The organization of the book starts with the author explaining how the XML Schema standard defines a template that documents created based on that template must conform to, followed by showing the reader how to define reusable data blocks based on the XML Schema language, and it finishes with XML Schema related topic such as namespaces and a rather complete overview what's out there and where to get more information.

Schemas are in a whole different category all by themselves. Every XML document, standard, protocol - basically anything that has anything to do with XML needs to use or to interact with XML Schema in one or another. XML Schemas are used to model both data and narrative XML documents, which means that if you are ever planning on interacting with XML, you better understand XML schemas. I thought that this topic will be very easy, and there is nothing to it... I was wrong. There is a whole lot to cover and once you read Bradley's book you'll know what I am talking about. The standard for schemas is so extensive, that the first few chapters of his book are spent on what the different terminologies mean and how they interrelate. For example, the difference between narrative data (data where the sequence of events and representation matters greatly) and datacenteric documents (order of presenting the data does not matter), and the difference between the schema definition author (the person who creates the schemas) versus the document instance author (people who create well-formed documents) and many others alike. After talking about the basics, the author spends a great deal of time explaining the various components of the XML schema such as elements, attributes, simple data type, complex data types, etc... Understanding these topics is essential in reading the following chapters of the book.
The author uses the same examples throughout the end, so the reader can follow the text and actually understand the topic while the author is presenting it. The code samples are just great. Since the topic is rather abstract, the author had spent a great deal of time using examples to demonstrate the topic at hand better. There were times that I read the example first, and then I went back to read the text, because the visualization is the key in this topic. As with any programming or technical book, the topic and examples start simple and they get much harder as you read the book. The same goes with this book, but the interesting thing is that if you don't know enough about namespaces, the author sends you off to one of the accompanying chapters to read to get ready. The chances are that you don't know enough about namespaces, and the "reference" topics included towards the end of the book become very valuable as you read this book. I thought that I knew namespaces rather well until I read the following:
"... namespaces do not exist as physical entities. There is no namespace definition markup language and no namespace file, object, or interface. ... namespaces are just a concept. This fact alone has led to much unnecessary confusion..."
In all the books and all the articles and the press and ... that I have read on XML, this little but rather important concept was left out. In one chapter the author has shed more light on a topic of namespaces than an entire book that one would find on the topic. The moral of the story is to read this book cover-to-cover. Even if you think you know it all, still spend the time to read this book. I was amazed at how complicated XML Schemas could get and how powerful they really are.
Some of the advanced topics covered include inheritance and pattern recognition. Both topics are very well explained and covered well. If you know regular expression from Perl, then pattern recognition in schema world would look very familiar to you. The same regular expression rules that are covered in Perl, govern the patterns matching in XML Schemas. What the author adds is concrete examples of how this technique can be used to build powerful schemas. Inheritance is another interesting topic in schemas, as inheritance has made XML schemas very object oriented. Some of your favorite concepts in Java map directly into schemas, and the author actually made table cross referencing the various "key phrases" in Java versus XML Schemas. If you are coming from the OO world of C++ or Java, take a look at this table first. If you are at all familiar with the Eiffel language, you would have a greater appreciation for some of the features of XML Schemas such as the ability to redefine an element or to extend specific parts of a schema.
In closing, if you think you know XML Schema's, think again. This book covers the topic in detail and does so very well. I would recommend this book to be read by any schema designer or a valuable reference for anyone interface with any XML technology.

This is a solid reference work on XML Schema. I wouldn't go looking to it for advice on how to solve particular problems with XML Schema. But if you are looking for a quick reference guide that covers all of the syntax with annotated examples then you have come to the right place. The graphics, which are light-weight and to the point help to illustrate the key points.

Two minor complaints are that the structure of the book is odd (chapters at the end of the book which are clearly appendices are structured as chapters), and the index is also a little short.

On the positive note, XML schema is not a particularly exciting topic and Neil's tone keeps it a light and interesting read.

So far this is the best book I have read on the subject.

I received this book, hoping to get some inside clues on how SOAP is implemented in .NET. I was running into some more sophisticated needs. I found the book to be full of general fluff. E.g., at the beginning it brings this corny motivation for SOAP that it's a better way for web page scraping. It actually believes that SOAP was made to replace code opening yahoo financials pages, and scraping stock quotes out of it. Hello? SOAP works along EDI and Corba. It's a simplified version of both that makes it easier and language/platform independent for those cases that don't need the full functionality of EDI or Corba.

Well, then there is a quote, where the author blankly asserts that posts are more useful then gets. I'm familiar with the debate about the pros and cons. But, an author just asserting one is better and putting as a reason 'trust me, baby, I'm smart', is just so pretentious.

To put it plain from flipping around in the book, I didn't find any good information, and the author just disgusted me with his way of writing and assertions. This is a total utter waste of time and money.

Here's what you get in the book: you will learn how to use .NET in order to shape your SOAP messages. There's a lot to know and understand: manipulating XML, creating custom attributes, debugging, reading messages. This book covers all of those items in detail and has the code to save you time. The book tells me exactly what I needed to know in order to make better use of SOAP in my .NET applications. Kenn teaches this stuff for Wintellect and developed the course on this. It's also pretty clear that the day jobs for both these guys involves writing Web Services. When you are done with the book, you will understand all you need in order to write your own Web Services.

I read the two other reviews and I don't understand why the readers are complaining. SOAP is one way to do Web Services and is the only thing that the authors talk about in the entire book. Perhaps this reader has a problem with the fact that, for the most part, SOAP == Web Services? As for the horrible waste of time review, I again think that the person didn't really look at the book. This is the best book I have seen to date which describes how to mold your SOAP messages, write custom attributes, etc. These guys explain pretty well what SOAP is for. Better for Web Page scraping? I think that reviewer simply picked up a copy in a book store, read 2 pages, and that's it.

I really enjoyed this book but I think that the title was misleading. There was as much (or more) information about web services and .net as there was about soap.

Overall the book covered a broad set of topics and showed some good example code. If you're new to web services and soap, and you plan on using .net, this book will get you good coverage in a small amount of time. If you don't intend to use .net, there are still some interesting topics, but the sample code won't help much.

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a language focused on facilitating the efficient, user-friendly and effective use and exchange of financial information.

Based on the widely-utilized XML (eXtensible Markup Language) language, XBRL is an important language that offers a host of benefits to both producers and consumers of financial data and information.

"Essentials of XBRL" offers a comprehensive overview of XBRL, in terms of defining and contextualizing the language and in terms of providing an executive-level overview of the benefits of XBRL.

This book is recommended reading for those interested in learning about XBRL. As XBRL is an evolving language, there are also a host of on-line resources and guides that should serve as good supplements to this book.

This handy and concise little book is full of valuable tips, techniques and real-world examples on the latest thinking, strategies, developments and technologies in XBRL. Highly recommended.

I'll save you the cost of this book by summarizing its content:

1. XBRL is a subset of XML that describes data using a pre-defined taxonomy of data identification tags established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants ideal for reporting of financial data.

2. XBRL (with an appropriate translator at each end) can act as a common data transport, aggregator or syndicator between any number of disparate financial systems and databases.

3. Implementing XBRL might be tough because there are competing standards like EDI and ebXML for the transfer of financial reporting data with an installed base of hardware and software that companies might be reluctant to scrap.

4. If XBRL is implemented on a large-enough scale, accountants can stop doing their current jobs and become consultants.


Disappointing for a Wiley publication

This book dates back to 1999, and since I'm writing this in 2006, that's seven years ago. Seven years is a long time for computer documentation. Virtually everything in the book is so far out of date that it's useless. The authors also didn't do a very good job of staying on topic; there are many long digressions that are neither interesting nor useful. In many cases, the authors merely give a broad-strokes outline of how to accomplish a particular task, or talk about several different approaches that have been taken by different people, without concluding with anything very helpful about how to actually accomplish the task.

I have found this book almost as useful and interesting as the LaTeX Companion. I think that it gives enough information about sharing TeX and LaTeX texts on the web, but the chapters covering pdfTeX and SGML/XML applications could be more detailed.
I have found that there is another big problem - with every day coming the information tends to get older and older. I can fully recommend buying this book today, but I am not sure if I would do it once more after half a year has passed.

If you were interested in transforming TeX into PDF, I would recommend also the LaTeX Graphics Companion, or some other book introducing the problematic of PostScript and PDF.

I am an user of latex on linux for sometime now. The possibillities are uncountable with this excellent software. This book touches on the use of tex and latex for the web. Being not that experienced with all the possibillities this book is very usefull. It is a good introduction for converting latex and tex files to documents for the web. If you can grasp all the stuff in this book you will be able to easily prepare all kinds of documents for the web and in the end save a lot of time lost with programming html yourself.
Don't expect to much examples and user details, it has an excellent index and reference list to get you started.
There is a lot of math stuff in this book, so trying to get a lot of formula's on the web this will certainly be of help. I am not into math so a couple pages could be skipped.
Concluding: want to get started with latex and the web, want to make good documents for the web on a fast and good way, this is the book for you.

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Having recently passed exam 70-310 I believe this book does a satisfactory job of exposing us to the basic concepts required for the exam. Unfortunately, basic concepts are not enough for 70-310. During my month of preparation, I found I had to refer to both MSDN and "Microsoft .NET Distributed Applications" (ISBN 0735619336) for more elaborate explanations and working examples (some of the Sybex sample code did not work, and no errata appeared to be available on-line).

Bottom line: if you plan to use this book to prepare for 70-310, then be prepared to supplement your studies with additional resources.

This is the third Sybex book I have purchased. The first two books I bought were for the 70-306 and 70-229 exams and they were both sufficient for those exams. Although I passed the 70-310 exam, I believe it is only because I first took the 70-306 exam which has a lot of overlap with the 70-310 exam. There were at least a half dozen questions out of 57 which were not even lightly covered in this book.

That said, I would still recommend this book as an introduction for your preparation for the 30-310 exam. The chapter on security is very well written and is superior to the same section in the 70-305/70-306 book. You will just need to cover each topic a bit more thoroughly with other materials (perhaps reading Microsoft online documentation after each topic). This is good advice for any exam since you should have a goal of thoroughly understanding each topic as well as wanting to pass the exam.

Anyone who uses Movable Type on a regular basis needed the book. It covers all of the basics around installation, setting up blogs and writing entries. But then it goes into more advanced topics like alternating the template and adding plugins. And even more advanced topics like RSS, Atom, and writing your own plugins. This is thorough book that is well written and will cover everything you need to know to blog with Movable Type.

This book is great for experienced and curious users. It's quite technical for lay users and the way information is presented isn't terribly user-oriented.

But the biggest problem is that Six Apart has updated Movable Type in ways that make this book obsolete in some aspects and that make it necessary to translate concepts in others. At this point, it's probably not worth the trouble to buy the book, and also probably not worth the trouble to write this kind of book when updates are so extensive and frequent.

Unless you already have solid experience writing software, you will find this book overwhelming. But it is better than the program documentation. There are few other choices. It looks like it was rushed to press and many of the examples don't quite work on my provider's server configuration, e.g., I don't have access to the unix command line so isn't always easy to envision the file structures. (If you didn't understand the last line, you might consider paying the folks at Movable Type to build your blog.)

But in all fairness, this is a difficult subject to explain. Since personal blogging is so new on the scene, it seems like the blog jargon is still a little fuzzy. Liberal use of Google helps. Since many of the concepts in blogging software are new to me, I would have appreciated a clearer explaination in the introduction, perhaps with some graphic illustrations. Some of the topics here, "Publishing with Movable Type" for example, are filled with examples and terminology that belong in a later section of the book. It would suffice to just give the reader a broader overview of how the software works.

I used this book on a couple of projects and was very impressed with how helpful it was. A suggest that I would like to see in this already large book is more examples of a full project. Each chapter addresses a part of the tool and the final chapter brings it all together, I would like to see another chapter for an example.

I picked up this book because I want to use a templateing system to produce web pages and I grok Perl pretty well. This book seems designed for at least two audiences, people who want to create something like a website using the TT and people who want to hack/extend the template toolkit.

The book is a very gentle and seemingly thorough introduction and explanation. The authors write with clarity and humor. I must admit that the authors write with such thoroughness and gentleness that I sometimes grew impatient. One addition I would have liked is more examples. Chapter 2 carefully explains a complete, but very simple example and Chapters 11 and 12 contain much richer examples. However, I find that I never learn unless I *do* and for such a long book, I was surprised that there wasn't more directly about the application of the TT.

You can use this book and the toolkit without knowing any Perl. The authors explain things well and clearly. However, you will get maximum value from the TT (and grok the syntax most quickly) if you know some Perl. The material on filters and plugins (there is a chapter on each, parts of another chapter about writing your own, plus entire chapters dealing with DBI and XML plugins... it's a good chunk of the book) is wonderfully detailed and probably justifies the book.

I skimmed most of the material on hacking and extending the toolkit. It seemed pretty thorough, even explaining how to alter or replace the TT syntax (right down to a quick tutorial on Yapp/yacc). I learned a lot from the little bit I read. I suspect this would be very helpful to Perl hackers and others as an example.

A note about the toolkit itself. It's very powerful. In many ways, it's like Perl itself (e.g., it has a Perl-like syntax). It has exceptions but scoping seems weak and there appears not to be anything like 'use strict'.

In summary, this is a good book for a variety of audiences. It is very well written and you should leave it's pages with enough know-how to use it for something like web page generation. I learned a lot about Perl and available CPAN modules (in addition to learning a lot about the TT). But I wish there was more direct practical application as examples, exercises, recipes, etc.

I was looking for a book which would describe the template toolkit in great detail for use in web development(CGI's).

Specifically I wanted something which would match the perl TT with Class::DBI and CGI::FormBuilder.

The Perl Template Toolkit was clearly written with good examples, but is fairly light in the CGI realm. Only chapter 12 has CGI examples, with no javascript thrown in.

A mating to CGI::FormBuilder is a natural marriage to the perl template toolkit, but CGI::FormBuilder is not even mentioned.

It's too bad the book doesn't cover in more detail some of the commonly used CGI modules in conjunction with the perl template toolkit, as the writing and examples are top notch.

It's a great look at the template toolkit, but doen't throw in enough info to hook it into the rest of the perl/web development realm to be as useful as it could have been.

With a few more chapters I think this could be a really great book.

I would not have purchased this book if I had thumbed through it at a bookstore.

I ordered this from the publisher and it literally fell apart as I started reading it. I'm going to have to 3-hole punch it and find a thick binder for the over 500 pages! I thought it might be the publisher (Sitepoint), but I just read that a Peachpit book (the new Scott Kelby book) is having the same problems. I wonder if they use the same binder? I can't actually review the book, as it's unreadable in the present condition. I have read other Sitepoint books though, and find them quite good, particularly the Yank book. This is the first one to fall apart.

While I wouldn't read this book cover-to-cover, it makes a very handy and current reference title for any intermediate PHP programmer.

100 Solutions, neatly divided into 13 chapters, make it very quick to find what I was looking for. The downloadable code from the publishers website also helped a great deal and saved me some time.

I found the security checklist at the back of the book particularly useful and helped me pinpoint and solve some potential vulnerbilities. Chapter 13 on best practices was also a clear standout in my mind, as it covers PHP coding best practices and helped me improve how I work.

I really wasn't sure what to expect with the book, my shelves are already packed with a stack of good PHP books that I've read through once, got a few good gems of info from, put on the shelf, and never touch again.

It was the title that got me first interested in this book, sort of like the greatest hits of PHP which, in theory, is a book that I expected to get a little more use from.

I'm happy to say that this book delivered on it's promise and them some.

The difference between this book and say some of the other more tutorial style PHP books I own is that it doesn't follow the one size fits all approach. It actually explains solutions to problems that your able to adapt you your own world. I downloaded the code from the books website which made my life even easier.

It's organized into stack of little mini tutorials covering most of the challenges you'll face if you're programming with PHP. I didn't read this from cover-to-cover but more jumped straight to some of the specific sections that I was keen to learn about. The layout and design of this book enables you to jump around from section to section easily.

I'm now finding myself going back to this book time and time again as new problems crop up, just today I had to solve a caching issue and violia a nice little example of exactly what I needed was there in chapter 11. It saved me a stack of time so I thought I'd use it to write this review.

It's also worth noting that chapter 1 contains a nicely written introduction to object-oriented PHP and is worth a read if your just starting with PHP and everyone should read chapter 13. Even though I've been programming in PHP for a while now this chapter opened my eyes to why I experience some of the frustrations I do... I'd probably be happy with paying the cover price just for that chapter alone.

It's my first sitepoint book and I've got to say I'm extremely happy. They seem to do things a little different than you're old schoolers and I've got to say the approach is refreshing. I'd have no problem with recommending this to PHP developers at any level.