<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Too high level and biased
Review: I have never disliked a technical book more than this one. The table of contents looks great - lots of coverage of everything having to do with XML. The content though, is very disappointing. For the most part, every topic is covered at a very high level and the author's biases are very generously woven throughout. I found several cases of overstatements and omissions of accurate information. (Perhaps it is already out of date?)This book might be good for someone trying to get a high level view of all that XML is capable of infiltrating. For anyone that wants any real technical content, this will be a big disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent explanatory text
Review: I read the entire book and some parts of it twice. It is perhaps the most organized book that I have ever read. It starts simple and moves to the complex. It is not a programmer's cookbook. It is an explanatory text and that is all that it claims to be. If you know little of XML this is an excellent place to start. If you think you know a lot about XML you will probably find much that you did not know in its 1200 pages. If you want to immediately start writing code that uses XML, then you need another book. This book has many good examples of code fragments designed to teach specific concepts. It does not try to build complete applications. It does have a section to refer you to other books that do lead you through complete projects. The author even maintains a web site listing "All the XML Books in Print" at http://www.xmlbooks.com. Any review takes on much from the perspective of the reviewer. I am not connected with the author or the publisher or anyone else connected with this book. I am an amateur programmer who writes educational software as a hobby. My real job is as mayor of a city. Although I have marked up student responses and stored XML segments in a relational database, I have never used the real power of XML. From this book and the more code-oriented books that I have ordered (from the author's recommended list) I think I will soon be able to use XML even for my simple uses.
Rating:
Summary: The One source you need to answer any question about XML
Review: It took Charles Goldfarb, Paul Prescod and many others, sixty-seven chapters to explain all there is to know about XML and XML related technology. This book must be the most complete reference book when it comes to XML: any thing from history of XML in Chapter 1 to VoiceXML in Chapter 46 and everything in between. This book is filled, and each chapter is appropriately marked with, Introductory Discussions, Application Discussions, Tool Discussions, Case Studies and Friendly Tutorials.
The author has broken the book into 24 distinct parts; each part can be studies independently as they are very well contained with background information, case study and appropriate discussions. The first part is devoted to readers who are not XML savvy, followed by three chapters of the basic XML use: Three-tier applications, E-Commerce and Integration. It is very much amazing to me how the author packs three very important topics in to less than one hundred pages, and gets the point across. If the topic get s a bit complicated like the chapter on Integration with the Web (chapter 13), the author quickly switches to a Case Study chapter and shows the reader how things are done by example.
"Content is King". Reading this phrase at the beginning of Part 5 tells you that Goldfarb knows what he is talking about, because content IS king. Content Management must be one of the best parts of this book. A case study followed by a chapter on content systems (Chapter 16) and a chapter on what the key components of a Content Management is (chapter 17) really wheels the context in and the reader gets a very good understanding of what this growing field is all about. "Content is King". Content Acquisition, which is covered in Part 10, is another very well covered set of topics. Being is a VERY complicated topic, the authors (guest authors and experts who helped with writing this section) start off by explaining what syndicators and subscribers are: Content providers and content receivers. ICE, a new protocol for content delivery created by the ICE Authoring Group is introduced and used thru out the chapter. The authors add: "The ICE protocol defines a model for the ongoing management of syndication relationships, including the roles and responsibilities of syndicators and subscribers" Using ICE:
-The syndicators can describe business rules
-The syndicators can create and manage catalogs of subscription offers
-A common format - XML, is used to exchange data between the syndicators and subscribers.
-Various delivery modes such as push or pull and frequency of delivery can be indicated by the subscribers
-The subscribers determine if content can be updated in delta format or otherwise
-The content can be received from and sent to many locations and repository types. The authors show the power of the tool and how it can benefit the end user and their application content management needs. "... If Web Services really is a revolution, it may be the first in history to be led by the parties in power." Web Services are the next set of topics covered in this book and two parts (13 and 14) are devoted to Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture. The author starts by giving the reason and the background of where Web Services came from and why they are here. (This is very common for this author as he explains every XML technology first and gives the reason why it's here) The good thing about this section is that Web Services have yet to be proven and the author conveys that message well:
"Web services is a very far-reaching and ambitious vision, with implications for all Web users and, if the goals are achieved, for much of the economy as well." The two big players in the Web Services world, mainly IBM and Microsoft helped in writing these two parts. It is very interesting to see that for the first time in a very long time, these two rivals see eye-to-eye about a technology such as Web services. A discussion of UDDI, the directory for discovering Web Services, WSDL, the Web Services Description Language, and SOAP are given. The icing on the cake is chapter 41 where experts from IBM talk about Service deployment and outlines the steps that need to be taken to do such task. The application that they deploy is very much useless, but the steps taken to deploy are priceless as they are very concise and clear. Service Oriented Architecture, their vision, methodology and benefits are given in chapter 42. The two main architectural patterns that are used today: service-centric design and the rich-client design are explained and are used as the groundwork to explain why SOA is a better approach to either of the two. Jumping to the last few parts of the book where the author[s] has added tutorials of all the major topics that were discussed in the text. XML Basics, Namespaces, DTD are just the beginning of some of the tutorials that added towards the end of this book. Whole parts are devoted to XPath, XSLT and XSL. XPointer also gets its own section with a chapter devoted to XLink. The great thing about these tutorials are that they are self contained and can be read independently of any other chapter of the book. They are quick study guides when you need them. C. Goldfarb, Paul Prescod and many experts that were involved in putting XML Handbook together did a great job in doing so. This book truly contains everything one needs to know about XML and XML technologies.
Rating: 
Summary: Unique resource, with issues
Review: The fifth edition of the XML Handbook is an interesting beast all in
itself. It's huge. The size of no other 'handbook' I have ever read,
weighing in at 1200 pages. My guess is that this book has grown from
edition to edition and has become the beast we see now. Starting with
the negative: * The organization of the book needs work. The chapters are in an
almost random order. For example, the chapter that describes XML at an
introductory level is number 51, which is almost at the back of the
book. * The organization of each chapter needs to be normalized into a format
that would ensure that each possesses valuable information. This book
is somewhat similar to the classic Design Patterns book in that it
covers a wide variety of topics. Having a chapter format that readers
can follow will make it easier to use the book as a reference work. * The graphics are inconsistent at best. Some are horrible in quality.
Others are too large. I wouldn't have bought the book if I were
flipping through it at the store. The quality of the graphics, which
seem to be largely borrowed company graphics, is too inconsistent. * The chapters are very short. There are 69 chapters in a 1200 page
book. You do the math. The chapter on XSL:FO, for example, is six pages
long. Barely enough text to introduce the topic, let alone explain it. * The book is not self-referential. For example, the topic of vector
versus bitmap graphics is covered twice. And the chapter on acronyms
simply lists their definitions without pointing the reader back into
the book for more information about where those acronyms are explained
in more detail. My guess is that this is an outgrowth of the organic
development of the book. All that being said, I am still giving the book a good rating because I
believe that it is a unique resource in the XML world. It's chapters
cover a variety of topics so sweeping that it provides a high level
overview of the entire map of XML development. Chapter 66, which
provides an overview of all of the different MLs is very good. Other
chapters, such as the RDF chapter (36) are also a very good
introduction. The breadth of the coverage is what makes this book
unique. All of the drill-down technology specifics are covered better
in other books. Is it worth buying? Tough to say. I think for someone tasked with a
high-level understanding of XML it is a valuable resource because it
provides an excellent tree-top perspective of the XML landscape. For
someone who is thick in the implementation of XML standards, it's
probably not worth it. What the book really needs is a thorough development editing pass to
reorganize the book, normalize the chapters, remove redundant content,
and to fix the problems with the illustrations and the text.
<< 1 >>
| 
