Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Examples but Limited Use for Beginners
Review: Summary: Excellent Examples but Limited Use for BeginnersI'm half-way through the "XSLT Cookbook" and I must say I like this author's style. Compared to my level, Sal Mangano is a master at writing style-sheets; however, I never feel as though he is writing down to me. While most of the book is composed of cut-and-dry material, Mr. Mangano also provides just enough (but no more) interesting and slightly humorous ideas to prevent distraction. The examples are pretty useful on their own for the programmer who is just learning the language), and they also prompted some stimulating ideas for my own projects. I especially find the chapters "Extending and Embedding XSLT" and "XML to XML" helpful (although the example in section 12.6 seems incomplete with no include statements). I would have preferred a little more details on embedding Saxon in Java, but the references provided (and the sample chapter of "Java and XSLT" from O'Reilly's web site) more than enough details to get me started. Even though there are several highlights of the book, the solutions presented are a little hard to figure out (since, as a beginner, I don't yet read the Extensible Style sheet Language fluently) so a second book or tutorial is recommended for those who are generally unfamiliar with or unconfident using XSLT and XPath. The second edition should definitely have a **brief** reference or tutorial for 'us' beginners. In chapter two, he also mentions discussing trig functions, but Mr. Mangano only gives one sentence and no examples for their XSLT solutions. Although I can guess at their implementation (using a series that I constantly use in my Complex Analysis class), I wish the author would still have included such an example.
Despite these flaws, I highly recommend Sal Mangano's manuscript as an addition for anyone who is learning XSLT or just wants a quick solution to a common problem.
Rating: 
Summary: Good XSLT reference for non-beginners
Review: The book is an excellent practical hands-on reference for
creating solutions in the XML-XSL Transformation domain. It covers areas from simple string operations to SVG generation
to extending XSLT with Perl, JavaScript and Java. The author Sal Mangano has good working examples with detailed
descriptions of the code. This makes experimenting with new
code relatively painless. Being an experienced XSLT developer I found the book easy to
follow. However people new to the concept of XML transformations
would do well to get a basic understanding of the matter before
diving into building solutions using this book. Having a copy of the XSLT Cookbook during the development
phase of the LCRA.org website project would have reduced the
time needed to craft a good sustainable solution, and reduced
the amount of code I had to redesign to be modular and flexible. An example is the recommendation : "Prefer 'selecting' and
'matching' over 'filtering'" pg 114, para 3. This allows for
flexible XML schemas. A companion CD with working example code and a searchable
text of the book on the CD would have been appreciated.
The website at Oreilly does have a downloadable zip file
of the examples. All in all well worth the $40.00 price of the book, Neeraj
Rating:
Summary: Wow! What a great XSLT book!
Review: The O'Reilly Cookbook series is a great place to find answers to really hard problems. I like the series because I can go to the "cookbook" subject I'm having trouble with, leaf through a few pages, and see an answer to a problem that is similar to my own. The XSLT Cookbook is very similar in structure to the other "cookbooks", but with an XSLT flavor. After going through the various recipes in this book, I can honestly say that I am amazed at the kind of things you can do with just XSLT. You can do more than just reformat XML to look nice on an HTML page-you can even use it to calculate statistical functions! Even if you're not planning on calculating a combinatoric, just looking through some of these patterns will make you a better XSLT programmer. One nice thing this book provides beyond the recipes is a discussion on how to extend XSLT via SAXON or Java. There is also discussion on how to use XSLT via Perl or Java. I was very impressed by the amount of time and thought that was put into the creation of many of these recipes-not only are many of them really, really hard to do, but they're also things I've seen a real need for in the real world. XSLT programmers, do yourself a favor and take a look through this book before you hurt your brain with your next assignment.
Rating:
Summary: Wow! What a great XSLT book!
Review: The O'Reilly Cookbook series is a great place to find answers to really hard problems. I like the series because I can go to the "cookbook" subject I'm having trouble with, leaf through a few pages, and see an answer to a problem that is similar to my own. The XSLT Cookbook is very similar in structure to the other "cookbooks", but with an XSLT flavor. After going through the various recipes in this book, I can honestly say that I am amazed at the kind of things you can do with just XSLT. You can do more than just reformat XML to look nice on an HTML page-you can even use it to calculate statistical functions! Even if you're not planning on calculating a combinatoric, just looking through some of these patterns will make you a better XSLT programmer. One nice thing this book provides beyond the recipes is a discussion on how to extend XSLT via SAXON or Java. There is also discussion on how to use XSLT via Perl or Java. I was very impressed by the amount of time and thought that was put into the creation of many of these recipes-not only are many of them really, really hard to do, but they're also things I've seen a real need for in the real world. XSLT programmers, do yourself a favor and take a look through this book before you hurt your brain with your next assignment.
Rating:
Summary: XSLT WITH A MAGNIFICENT TOUCH
Review: The outlook of this "XSLT Cookbook" is refined: giving luxurious accommodation to experts, without scaring beginners away. Most of its 450 pages were dedicated to a sensible problem-solution-discussion pattern, (which readers should appreciate).
Apart from analyzing how to manipulate XML documents with Stylesheets, elaborate methods of using SVG and XSLT to plot graphs and charts were stressed. The otherwise tricky art of creating SOAP documentations from WSDL (using XSLT) was reduced to nursery rhymes.
I am satisfied by this author's method of tackling XSLT problems. Still, when the next edition of this book appears, I would expect to see a better job done: as regards all those precursors, which facilitate the processing of Visio documents in XSLT.
In conclusion, I would say that this is one of the few eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations books, which did not discriminate between beginners and advanced learners. All are welcomed! A great value indeed!
Rating:
Summary: Great reference for XSLT solutions
Review: The XSLT Cookbook offers more than one hundred code solutions to common XSLT problems. The covered topics range from string operations, handling dates and numbers to converting xml to various formats, like text, HTML or SVG.
The author also included some speciality solutions for working with Visio and Excel documents or generating XTM Topic Maps. The last chapters of the book cover some more advanced topic, like extending XSLT and testing stylesheets.
As it is a Cookbook, the beef of this book are the code examples. All examples I tested so far are of outstanding quality and work great. For the most problems you will encounter when writing stylesheets, this book offers an example. Just look it up and you are there.
The very high quality of this book and it's code examples is impressive. The author Sal Mangano sure put a lot of work and research into this book. And the expertise of Jeni Tennison, as technical reviewer, and Simon St.Laurent, as editor, sure were an important factor in achieving this quality standard. If you are an absolute beginner, you probably should start with a more tutorial style book, but as soon as you have some basic knowledge of XSLT, this book is a great reference for XSLT solutions.
Rating:
Summary: Down to earth advice
Review: This book is invaluable as an adjunct to some of the reference works, such as O'Reilly's XSLT book. This book provides practical examples of how to solve common problems you face when you develop with XSLT. The chapters on querying and selecting and traversing are worth the price alone.
Rating: 
Summary: not for beginners
Review: This is not a book for beginners. Not for beginning programmers, and not for advanced programmers who don't know much about XSLT. An introductory chapter or two explaining XSLT, and maybe a few really simple examples (10-20 lines each), would have gone a long way towards making this book more useful. If you already know XSLT pretty well, though, this could provide some useful sample code.
Rating:
Summary: Essential Reference for XSLT Applications
Review: What an incredible resource this book is! I am using XSLT to transform XML data into flat files that are delivered to a legacy DOS application, so the chapters on text and string manipulation were extremely helpful. In addition, the author has illustrated examples that covered almost every road-block that I ran into while developing XSLT files. I also like the approach in illustrating generically useful examples for applications in general, not just web applications. An assential resource for anyone wanting to implement XSLT in a hurry.
Rating:
Summary: Pleasing and not patronizing
Review: What pleases me so much about this book, and it really does please me, is that Sal Mangano writes fantastic, well thought out templates for use in your XSLT stylesheets, and tells you what makes them so wonderful. Even more importantly, he's willing to show you alternatives to the solution he provides and explain why they're not optimal. This book is like a computer science class taught in XLST, and while not the most thrilling subject in the world, it's certainly well-planned, well-executed, and well worth having on your bookshelf.
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