XSLT

Rating:
Summary: Dear Doug, ...
Review: Sorry, Doug, I have not read your book; it looks very good, very thorough and very entertaining, but I have not read it.

Your book sits by my feet and gets picked up half a dozen or more times a day when I go straight to the index, pick out the particular issue I'm having as I struggle to learn XSLT on a crash course to production code, then it's straight to that one or two paragraphs that precisely answers my question and *zoom*, back it goes to the floor. Like Larry Wall's Perl (still unread after 4 1/2 years), I'm reading XSLT in random-access, a bit here, back over there, scoot to the back here ... it's going to take me years to read the whole thing, but I suspect it's very good.

Rating:
Summary: Short on Explanation!!
Review: The author seems to take for granted that the reader already knows XSLT. While there is a comprehensive list on XPath, the author doesn't provide enough examples on how the different expressions works. When one comes across a complicated XPath expression in one of his code examples, one is often left wondering what it means. Perhaps the author could help his readers out by taking the time to explain his approach in greater detail instead of just dumping the code on our laps.

Also, I tried out a lot of the examples in the book - both typing them out manually by hand and using the ones downloaded form the website, and a lot of them simply won't work! I end up spending more energy troubleshooting my code than actually understanding what's going on. Needless to say, it's endlessly frustrating, and I'm ready to go back to JSP and Servlets.

Finally, there's a lack of proper reference to the examples given in the book. A lot of guess work is involved in finding the correct piece of code from the downloaded examples that corresponds with the ones in the book.

I recommend this book only if 1. You already know XSLT and have some extra money to throw away, or 2. You're masochistic and is seeking to be frustrated with a futile pursuit.

Rating:
Summary: Concise and clear
Review: The best and most concise reference work on XSLT. Though you will probably need to get another book, like the XSLT Cookbook, to get a feel for the way that XSLT should be written as opposed to what all of the options are.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed
Review: The xsl element reference and function references are useful. The rest of the book is *very* difficult to follow. Not for beginners, and probably not detailed enough for more advanced users.

Rating:
Summary: Good book, but be careful
Review: There is no doubt in my mind that Doug Tidwell could use XSLT to build a rocket and fly to the moon, but does that mean you should? The large amount of effort required in XSLT to do what are traditionally simple tasks tells me that these are tasks that XSLT was not designed to do. Making the distinction between what a language CAN do for you and what it SHOULD do is important, and failing to do so can lead to the abuse of a tool along with the maintenance nightmare that follows.

While the coverage of XPath was great in that it was a separate topic, it is unfortunate that a similar technique was not applied to XSL tags and functions. Throughout the examples you are "accidentally" introduced to things like the sum() function in chapter 7 (which is supposed to be dedicated to the document() function) and the starts-with() function in chapter 4. Granted the "Reference" sections in the back address all of these functions -- but without a detailed table of contents. The result is that I don't know what XSLT really *can* do, and leaving all of the useful information in the back is like reading a dictionary to learn to speak English.

As a side-note, this book is cumulative. You'll have a hard time understanding chapter five unless you've read chapters one through four.

Finally, don't use this book on it's own unless you have an intimate understanding of XML and namespaces. One thing this book has made me realise is that I don't know the intricacies XML as well as I thought I did.

I would buy this book because it introduces you to a lot of programming techniques and various creative ways to use XSLT to get the results you want. Just remember that if it takes three pages of code to do something that would take three lines in Java, then maybe XSLT isn't the answer.

Rating:
Summary: One Hard Read
Review: This book is hard to read. The writing is bad.
The examples are tough to follow.

Rating:
Summary: There are better offerings out there
Review: This book is OK :( for an introduction XML, DTDs and XSLT. The information is scattered and not put together very well. A lot of information is also incorrect/inaccurate, be prepared to verify claims about mentioned products and technologies.

Rating:
Summary: Scatter brained - not exactly accurate
Review: This book is OK :( for an introduction XML, DTDs and XSLT. The information is scattered and not put together very well. A lot of information is also incorrect/inaccurate, be prepared to verify claims about mentioned products and technologies.

Rating:
Summary: Light on details and useful examples, plus terrible index
Review: This book left me a little high and dry. While it explained basic stuff about XSLT, and indeed did get me from knowing little to knowing a lot more, this book fell short once you had the basics. I come away feeling like XSL is both obtuse and difficult to use (perhaps this is an accurate assesment :-), but I feel that the author failed to offer specific details that would be important to help understand, and also didn't provide guidance on how to diagnose and resolve problems.

Much of the book is a reference, and to be fair, each element has a pretty good example. But the organization of the reference is poor, making it difficult to find what you are looking for. For example, there are four separate appendices each alphabetically organized, but if you're not sure which one you need, that's frustrating. Worse, the index is simply terrible, not even having entries on essential elements!

Rating:
Summary: Suffers from the Big Honking Example Problem
Review: This book suffers from the big honking example problem. The authors clearly understand the subject but choose to not show each idea in a small code snippet (one that is usable) but wait until the end of the chapter (or book) and show everything. It would have been more useful to show each xml and xslt template snippet for each topic (such as how to use named templates with the call-template bit) or even how to do a for-each loop. In the end, searching for the language construct in the big honking example became to frustrating and complex, I have switched to a different book.