XML Books

I am disappointed by purchasing this book. This book would give you just general overview of various ways about rss.

Information on Initial chapter keep on referring to later chapter in the book and information on later chapter are also just general.

RSS is interesting on a number of levels. As a consumer of information, RSS lets you get massive amounts of information in a convenient manner, allowing you to quickly hone in on what you want to read. As a distributor of information (i.e., a blogger or website owner), RSS lets you distribute information easily which may increase readership of your efforts.

But what do you really have to know about RSS as a consumer or distributor of information? Well, depending on your level of curiousity, it may be a lot or a little.

And to your rescue comes Steven Holzner. Holzner has written a ton - the back cover says 95 - of books of technical subjects. I've read many of them and haven't found a bad one yet. This is no exception.

Holzner covers just about every aspect of RSS, from defining and explaining what it is to RSS readers to creating feeds manually. It's really quite thorough and Holzner has a gift for making technology understandable.

Highly recommended for anyone seeking an introductory to medium grounding in RSS.

Jerry

Steven Holzner does a wonderful job of starting with the very basics of RSS and moving onto more advanced topics towards the end of the book. He covers RSS Feeds, RSS Readers, Blogging with RSS, Podcasting, Publicizing your feeds, RSS Best Practices, and a few other topics.

The book is well-written and easy to read, and well-designed (something I've found with all of Peachpit's titles. While most folks won't be interested in the details of creating a feed by hand, or the subtle differences between versions of the RSS standard, these tidbits ensure the book is a complete treatment of the subject.

For $15 (here on Amazon) you're not going to find a better look at RSS.

This is a great reference book for beginners... I myself am a seasoned systems analyst and already had books that covered most of the basic topics discussed in this book. There were no real world examples and nothing about the pitfalls of using web standards before they are even supported by popular browsers. Like I said at first, it is a really great reference book; and if you need one to get started, this is it! You will still need a book dealing with the methodology variations in coding.

How the Web has grown! In doing so, and aiding its growth, has been the use and development of several languages. Naturally, Schafer starts with the language that birthed the Web - HTML. Actually this needs its dual ("twin") on a server, http. But Schafer discusses http in a later chapter devoted to CGI.

Hopefully, you should be able to appreciate that HTML is simple. In fact, of all that the book discusses, HTML is the simplest language. Several initial chapters walk you through HTML. It must be stressed that mastery of HTML is needed to make sense of the rest of the book.

The later languages either extend the scope of an HTML file, or they generate the file, roughly speaking. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) lets you easily factor out common definitions that are used across multiple web pages, where you can imagine that each web page corresponds to a file storing it. Schafer explains how to use CSS to simplify management of a set of HTML files. A centralised way to set common fonts and the like. More robust.

But HTML is a declarative language. Good, because laymen can more easily understand and write such languages. It's easier to say what should be done, than how to do it. But for the times when you need more expressive power on the browser, Schafer offers JavaScript. A procedural language that actually has nothing to do with Java. [The coincidence in names was a marketing ploy.]

Schafer does not ignore the server. CGI is given, as the first generation attempt at server side code. Its limitations spawned the use of Perl, PHP and Python for easier parsing of user input and generation of new dynamic pages.

Each of these languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, PHP and Python) is often the subject of its own book. No surprise then that Schafer explaining all 6 gave us a book of this length!

This is a good book to refresh yourself on the syntax of each language, but don't try to learn web standards from this book! It spends about 10 pages in the HTML language section talking about how wonderful tables are when used to control the layout of your entire site. Anyone with any experience in HTML knows that this is a very bad idea. The Perl section had a few things wrong in the code as well. Overall, I was not impressed with this book. I probably could have gotten better tutorials for free on the internet.

This is a great introduction to XML book. It covers all of the subjects in enough detail to give a good overview, but it doesn't go into too much detail about advanced topics like some intro books do. The illustrations and examples are good for someone who is new to XML. If you are looking to learn the fundamentals of XML, this book is a good choice.

This book provided an excellent overview and introduction to the XML language. It provides a lot of good examples without relying on too many third party products. It is short enough to get through quickly, but also gives enough technical details to give readers a solid understanding of the topics. I would highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to learn XML.

This is the worst technical book I have ever read. The information is wrong in places. The information is far too abbreviated in the entire book. I would not even call this a book. Being very kind, I would call this a leaflet.
Far too many fluff drawings, blank pages and repeated information. Specifically, this book advertises to have 192 pages, but only about 100 pages have relevant information; the last page number in this book is 167, which is at the end of the index. This is followed by 13 completely blank pages.
If you want a book on XML, start with "Beginning XML" by David Hunter. It has all of the details that you need to understand XML. From there, you can tackle XSL, JDBC, etc.

If you are already using XML, it is probably with DTDs, as this was the first implementation of XML. Both came out of SGML, in which the role of DTDs was defined in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, the drawbacks of DTDs were not fully appreciated until they began to be widely used in XML. A DTD cannot easily constrain an integer variable to a range of values from 5 to 10, say. It has no conception of common primitive types like float or double found in many programming languages. Also, the structure of a DTD is quite unlike that of the XML document it supports. From the point of view of writing parsers, you end up effectively needing two parsing algorithms to read a DTD and an XML document. XML Schemas answer all these issues. Plus namespaces are built into them, to handle collisions in tag names when you use multiple Schemas in a document. With DTDs, namespaces came into being after DTDs were first defined, and had to be bolted on in a most awkward fashion. XML Schema notation for namespaces is much more natural.

The problem right now with XML Schema is that it is new. Most XML books use DTDs, in part because when they were written, the Schema specification was not finished by W3C (in May 2001). Some XML books since then do describe Schema. They usually give a good overview and provide examples that work for the XML document examples they describe. So if you have an application that you want to write a Schema for, you can get started. But chances are, you soon run into problems if your application is not a carbon copy of a text's example. You soon need some Schema component or attribute whose usage or even existence was not disclosed in that book.

This book addresses that shortfall. It provides at least one example of how to use every attribute of EVERY Schema element. A formidably comprehensive task. Which accounts for the near thousand page size. But this is far more than just some dictionary-style exposition. They describe important closely related issues, like how to use the DOM and Xerces SAX parsers, and the different outlooks these take. Also, from your viewpoint of how to write a Schema for YOUR application, they offer a top-down approach. Schemas can be result-oriented or data-oriented. You get enough details to help decide which case yours fits. This can greatly aid developing a facile "natural" Schema. One where once you have it and an example XML document that uses it, the layout taxonomy seems axiomatic. Which should be your goal. It is not enough to define a Schema that can hold all the information you have. The skill is in making a Schema that does that and has a clear, obvious logic. Because in many cases others, probably not as technically adept as you, get to fill in documents based on it. So the logic should be clear to them. Even if they do not directly write into an XML document, but build it from a GUI, the clearer the Schema, the easier it is for someone to build a GUI to populate a document based on it.

The authors also provide a website (XMLSchemaReference.com) that has the code described in the book, and many more examples. Worth bookmarking.

So try this book and its website if you need an authoritative guide to writing Schemas.

Certainly not a book for learning about XML schemas, may be used as a reference. Very theoretical, particularly the first few chapters, and strikingly similar to W3 recommendations. If you are just starting with XML schemas, pick a different book.

I've been doing a whole bunch of schema development work lately and I find that I've been referring to this book frequently. My only criticism is that the some of the early chapters are a little too theoretical for a plain old programmer like myself--but the extensive reference material provides me with all the information that I've needed to build a complex set of interlocking schemas.

This book was a little light in practical information, as could be expected for a pre-beta book. If it were my money, I would wait and buy the MS Press Introduction to .Net My Services coming out this spring, since it will be based on the latest spring code release of the .NET My Services SDK. Hailstorm, or .NET My Services, does sound like a great idea, and I am looking forward to finding out more when the beta SDK goes public. That code will probably be more useful to a developer than the code in this book.

Imagine a personal profile (personal database) with your mail, calendar, contacts, application settings, wallet and eight other services plus an unlimited number of web services done by third parties that is maintained centrally by Microsoft as a completely open platform for any certified web services developer to use for authentication, user setup, communications routing, chat, payment authorization and execution, etc. - a giant Mrs. Gates cookie to replace all others! That's HailStorm.

An alpha release called HailStorm in a Box, or HSiaB, is available now for developers wanting a head start. HSiaB runs only on your LAN with your HS server doing the work of the future Microsoft server. It's free on the Microsoft web site. HS is all implemented in SOAP and XML of course. HSiaB requires Windows 2000 and SQL 2000 and each of these is free in a trial version from Microsoft as well.

This is bleeding edge stuff and the name "in a Box" is reminiscent of the early (1994) exciting days of browsers when many of us got "Internet in a Box" from Spyglass, the holder of the first Mosaic commercial license. HSiaB is not a revolutionary event like Mosaic, but it is very significant.

The book is a quick 203-page guide to HSiaB with plenty of coded examples. This is great fun for the serious geek even if you hate the name Microsoft. You can pick it up and finish it in one sitting since the code can be comprehended without actually running it. Installing HSiaB (fully explained in the book) and running the code will give hours more of fun. Think of something so new that you actually do some setups from a command line. Bill must have hacked this together himself. Way to go, Bill!

Imagine getting excited about something like this during the holidays. I must be sick. I picked it up at 5:30 AM this morning and could not put it down.

It's a little tough to review this book since in general this is a nice walkthrough of a variety of XML standards. The title, however, hints at a book that would discuss schema design and common XML issues. There is a need for that book, but this is not that book.

This book is a relatively short straightforward walkthrough of XML markup, data standards, searching, legacy conversions and performance. It's around 200 pages with around 20 pages. The tone is light but terse. Graphics are sparse and are used effectively.

I think this would be an ideal introductory work for someone just starting out with XML. Though I think there are other books that are as good or better.

If only this book had the content implied by it's title.

Ideally, you should already be using XML, to gain the most from this book. The author gives a guide to the huge overlayer of extensions and standards that have accrued atop XML, like barnacles on a ship. Unfortunately, threading this maze to understand what you might really need is not easy for many. So his viewpoint might help you.

Also, at the implementation level, he offers practical advice about such key usages as XML data. He gives advantages and disadvantages. The latter is the best part of the book. Because other books that might explain the topic to someone new to it often just talk about the syntax and the great things that you can accomplish. Rarely will such texts discuss any limitations that have been found through painful experience.

It's not just for XML data that he does this. For documents, networking, searching, performance and legacy information, he analyses the disadvantages.

Like so many technology books, this sits in a topic space where there is just not a lot of material to draw from. Much like its cousins, BizTalk, SiteServer, and CRM - there is not a wealth of information available in print media. Ok, so what makes this book a bummer?

A reasonable person would assume that when you buy a book for $40-60, that you are getting something insightful - something that you would have traded your sister for to have figured out without spinning your wheels endlessly or burning support incidents @ $225 a pop. Unfortunately, this book adopts the lowest possible threshold in terms of content. Here's the irony: I sat down to plug away at an InfoPath Solution and figured I'd follow the book just to see what happened. By Page 10 I was annoyed. By Page 20 I was checking the Index and Appendix to search for my specific interests (after all, I had something I wanted to get on with). An hour later, I was consulting some very cool material online, complete with blow-by-blow examples, code shots, and visuals. Book has been sitting in its last known good configuration since then. What's worse, a simple search on the InfoPath help topic yielded EXACTLY the same material as in the book. Well WTF. It turns out that Wrox's authors basically pillaged and regugitated the Help file - almost verbatim. That's what prompted me to write this. I didn't have to pay for the book, but if I did - I would be plenty pissed-off right now....and shortly after I calmed down, Barnes and Noble (err...or Amazon, yeah that's it!) would be getting my return. Naturally, at that point I would have burned 5 hours between shopping, buying, reading, commenting and returning the book - which is a gross waste of time. Save yours: listen up.

The first 4 chapters of this book talk about XML, Schemas, DTD's, XSLT, and reference materials. Honestly, there's so much useless information here, you might as well read the intro and go straight to Chapter 5. Why? For several resons: I don't need a reference book on XML, or any of its cousins. That's already published for free. Plus, InfoPath takes all of that pain away. Drag and drop, link controls to bindings, choose a data source, link it to your bindings and away you go. I don't need to read 100 pages of materials on the inner workings - we know it works, that's why we're using it. Only the most bleeding edge / neurotic / hardcore developers with weird requirements are ever going to have to mess around with that stuff. Rapid Applications Development anyone? - That's what InfoPath was designed for.

Chapters 5,6,7,8 are the meat. Chapters 15,16,17 have worthwhile examples of ADO.NET script.


What I would like to see:

Working examples of full-on solutions. Fabrikam, BizTalk, SQL, BI.

More code shots.

Show me how to design a Form within Visual Studio.Net 2003/2005, and work the code-behind to do neat stuff.
Show me how I can develop solutions using SharePoint, XML, and BizTalk.
Show me how to create a custom Web Service? (this is, ahem, rather important, and not very well done)

Solutions people. Rapid development. Small books that put you in the driver's seat ASAP.

This isn't it.

Note: One of the best publishers I have seen recently re: Technical Books has to be Rational Press. I have found their books to be highly insightful, right to the heart of the matter, and @ sub-100 (or thereabouts) pages, you get a lot of bang for $20 bucks.

(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/ref=s_sf_b_as/002-0585726-2670403)

Wrox: Are you listening? Bad Monkeys. Stop the proliferation of title after title. It's like like dating a Narcissitic woman: they're so in love with themselves that they LIVE to hear themselves talk: even if it's complete Tripe that comes out of their mouths.

Technologists (aspirinig or professionals) would do well to remember that Wrox is in the business of publishing and selling books: that doesn't always mean that they are worth your time or your money. I have watched Wrox's value as a print resource slowly degrade since I stated reading their titles in 2000. In my opinion, they are no longer a trusted (and valued) informational resource. Wrox has saturated the marketplace with title after sub-title - many of which never should have received their own cover, much less their whopping price tags. (Do you guys publish books at any other price point other than $50.00?) Not many, to be sure.

Potential buyers: think, read, and review before you buy any technology book. Wait for the next offering on InfoPath (if there is one before Office v.12). Your best bet will be online: MSDN, GotDotNet, BizTalk, and some other very neat sites that specialize in valuable content - for free! Google it. You won't be sorry.

ch

Professional InfoPath 2003 is definately not "InfoPath for Dummies". This in-depth look at the behind the scenes technology of InfoPath is an XML-lovers dream - excellent details regarding how InfoPath uses xml technology. If you are looking for a "how to use InfoPath" book, this isn't it. If you are a programmer who wants or needs to know every detail of how InfoPath uses xml, you've found the right book.

Creating Web Pages by Preston Gralla and Matt Brown (ISBN 0-672-32690-6) does start out well. It gives one a great overview of what the internet is and how it works. The book then proceeds to explain the basics of HTML and how to plan out a website in very comprehensive and understandable language. After the first three chapters, you have to skip ahead to find out how to effectively prepare and add graphics to your pages. In between, there are chapters dealing with building websites on Geocities or using Yahoo PageBuilder or Netscape Composer to actually build your site. The problem I had is that everything is really geared to PC - Window based users. I have a MAC and there is really nothing in the author's approach to show that things change and that there are differences between the MAC and PC platforms and how pages may appear.

The last third of the book deals with eBay listings and Blogs. The section about eBay is pretty extensive, giving the reader all sorts of helpful information about everything from finding items to sell to preparing effective graphics to post to pricing and effective ad copy writing. If interested in opening an eBay store, this is a great resource to turn to. Again, the authors explain things thoroughly and in an easy to read manner.

Finally, there is a section about Blogs, which was interesting, since I have never really had a clear understanding of what a Blog was. So while helpful, not something I am interested in creating.

Overall, the book is good for a beginner with a PC. It is excellent if you want to sell on eBay. If you are a MAC user, I'd recommend finding another book.

As the web has grown, several modalities of usage have become iconic. In response, Gralla and Brown explain 4 of these. To be sure, entire books are devoted to eBay alone, for instance. But this AllInOne text steps back and offers a consistent thematic understanding. Based on being able to make a web page.

The early part of the book goes over HTML basics. You need mastery of this to proceed. The book then gives the 4 modalities as case studies. You may well not want to learn all of them. But if you are reading this, you're probably interested in at least one. The utility of the exposition is to show how learning the chapters for that can give you skills transferable to the other topics.

Now of these topics, blogging has the skimpiest coverage. This might reflect its realities. Most blogs afford you some graphics that you can alter, as a blogger. Like uploading images. But blogging is primarily textual.

The eBay section is far more extensive. For some of you, it may also be the most compelling. Since unlike the other modalities, this is about directly making money. To this ends, if you are interested in this section, read the descriptions about using images in your auctions. Of all the actions you can do as a seller, providing a good image of your item has been shown, on average, to yield higher bids. This also nicely ties into an earlier section of the book, that discusses using Photoshop to improve your digital photos.

As someone new to XML Schema, this book was just what I was looking for - a comprehensive introduction that I could read from cover to cover.

It assumes knowledge of XML and DTDs, but otherwise guides you very systematically through the topics, without a need to flip back and forth.

It is neither a tutorial, nor a reference, but has very clear examples to learn from and is well-enough laid out to serve as a reference later.

In contrast to many IT books, it is written in an engaging style that I found easy to read as a narrative.
It lends itself well to reading a chapter, then starting up an XML editor and experimenting. Then trying the next chapter and so on.

It's easy to trip over some of the terminology with Schema's, and this book fumbles along through out. Well versed in DTDs, and getting comfortable with Schemas I decided to buy this book. I actually knew less about Schema's as a result of reading it. The way Contents and Types were described and then the examples that were used, will do little more than confuse the reader. Grab the O'Reilley Schema book or one of the thousands of other Schema books if you want a reference OR a tutorial.

This is an outstanding book with useful information and clear explanations. It doesn't just cover the VoiceXML spec but also shows you how to use it in IVR-replacement systems and other real applications. If you really need to build stuff with voicexml then you need this book. You can tell in reading the book that these authors have *actually done* voice application development and aren't just guessing at how it ought to work. I'm looking forward to the online voicexml 2.0 appendix, too.

This book isn't a good book to use if you're looking to develop VoiceXML applications. This book delves too far into proper software engineering and doesn't give enough information about the VoiceXML standard (doesn't touch vxml 2.0). I wish I would have purchased the wrox version that covers voiceXML.