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Book Review: Learning XML Buy this website for $5000 USD Priced to sell, this is an established JavaScript website, growing in popularity as evidenced by its Alex ranking. Includes most website content. The price is NON-NEGOTIABLE. Serious buyers should contact Book Title: Learning XML Learning XML is published by O'REILLY. I usually buy O'REILLY because, for the type of technical books I'm interested in, I find them to be the safest bet. I have read a few very bad O'REILLY books, but you're less apt to get a dud with O'REILLY. Unfortunately, while I have read some excellent O'REILLY books, most of them tend to be mediocre to borderline good. I would classify Learning XML as mediocre. The biggest problem with O'REILLY books is that they are too terse. This is certainly the case with Learning XML. One problem I had with Learning XML was that XML Namespaces weren't given the proper attention they deserved. There was hardly any mention of Namespaces. If I was to read this book without any prior knowledge of Namespaces, I believe I would run into trouble when mixing namespaces in a document. Beginning XML 2nd Edition, also reviewed here, devotes an entire chapter to Namespaces, as the topic deserves. Another problem I had with this book is that the XSLT chapter was too terse. The examples were the biggest problem for me. I like tiny, isolated examples that are complete, and convey a certain point. Learning XML would tend to have one big example, and keep building upon that example with follow-up, smaller examples. The follow-up examples don't come with the downloadable examples. You're expected to type them in. The follow-up examples are better described as code fragments than actual examples, as they often cannot run alone. This is not the way I like to operate. When I pay good money for a book, I like things clear, concise and easy. I don't like being expected to conjoin code fragments with other examples in order to run them. O'REILLY is typically very stingy when it comes to dissemination of examples. It is like they're bent on saving trees as well as bandwidth. Learning XML does in fact have some big huge examples in it, but they are more like fully-functional programs than concise examples that convey a specific point. They're pretty useless to a person that just wants to get his feet wet and learn the basics. XSLT operators were never clearly defined, but in most cases things are clearly presented, defined, and organized. XML Schema is given only a cursory overview, but that's not really the fault of the book as XML Schema was still a working draft at the time the book was written. You can get newer books such as Beginning XML 2nd Edition which have up-to-date information on this topic. There is a very nice Glossary, but the skimpiest Appendix I've ever seen. If you want a real Appendix, O'REILLY probably expects you to shell out some more bucks for their Nutshell book. About half of the book's downloadable examples were missing DTDs. One of them, the huge DocBook example, that was paid so much attention to in the book, was not well-formed XML. Sloppy-sloppy-sloppy. This is typical of O'REILLY. They pay very little attention to examples. They don't seem to care either, as I have brought this to their attention before. What's so sad about this is that O'REILLY is supposedly one of the best publishing outfits in the industry. In light O'REILLY's sloppiness in the case of this book's examples, I've decided to downgrade my rating of this book from mediocre to poor. Reviewed by: Ed Phillips
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