XSLT

Rating:
Summary: Find Another book
Review: This book was difficult to use, and I found that the author tried to cram too much into his examples. Some concepts were really poorly explained. Fortunately my company paid for this book, and not me.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but Could be Better
Review: This is a good introduction to XSLT, and the book contains an extensive reference section which will certainly be helpful. The downside is the author's technique of trying to teach relatively simple concepts through the use of fairly complex examples. I prefer to have a concept explained and then see a fairly simple example. Not all of the chapters are this way. Some of the early ones are very well done, but I found myself just skimming through some of the chapters because I don't want to read 4 pages of code to understand one concept.

XSLT does have a farily verbose syntax, so the author cannot always reduce the size of the code listings. In those cases, it would be really nice if the 3 or 4 important lines of code were highlighted in some way to assist the reader.

Rating:
Summary: Good book but probably there is a better one
Review: This is in my opinion is a good book on XSLT. It teaches the basics and then some advanced stuff as well. I especially liked the XSLT reference (the latter half of
the book) with examples of how to use the XSLT features, functions etc.

I picked it up because i'm preparing for the IBM xml exam and this is listed as a reference in the IBM web site.

The only complaint i have is that the book lists the entire code and they run for pages! :-(. I find it to be very distracting.

It was better to just show a few code snippets to highlight a partcular point and the reader c'd anyway use the code listing available in downloadable format in the oreilly web site.

Hope the author will cover more meaty stuff in the 2nd edition probably and avoid such big code listings.

I read the freely downloadable chapters of "XSLT quickly" by Bob Ducharme and found it to be excellent.
Unfortunately that book is'nt available here in India!

I would recommend that book over this one for people looking for a good introduction to XSLT. It's so crisp! and has been written for people who have been programming before.

Also check out XSLT and XPATh on edge..by Jeni tennison. wow i liked it. It assumes knowledge of XSLT though (ateast the basics) and deals with various practical usage of XSLT.

I have read 3 chapters as of now and found it to be very well written and useful.

If you are a java programmer looking to XSLT, i would recommend the following:

XSLT Quickly
XSLT and XPath on the edge
Java and XSLT

Rating:
Summary: What's neXt?
Review: This will form the basis for preparing materials for the World Wide Web for years to come. XML/XSLT are sufficiently usable examples of SGML potential to make possible the "everyone, everything connected" dream that we all long for.

The only real "problem" is that it's in print so you can't contract/expand the too-lengthy code examples that interfere with a smooth read of the essential materials. The code is, after all, for machines to read. The rest of us just jump over it.

A really nice book.

Love.

Rating:
Summary: IBM Cert. ->You will need NewRds' Inside XSLT CH4,7,~8 too
Review: Wow! Mr. Tidwell, Orielly -- I think you embedded this book in XML tags and ran an xpath predicate to filter out all the good stuff. In order for students to get up to speed they will have to purchase "Inside XML" for xpath info.

I am a third of the way through chapter 5 and am wondering if IBM could change its recommendation due to this book's lack of teaching ability. On a positive not, the book has a professional look and will serve as good reference once the material is digested -- please take pepto bismol prior and have other published material handy.

-Ken

Rating:
Summary: XSLT can be hard to grasp
Review: XSLT can be hard to grasp for people (like me) coming from traditional procedural programming, Doug Tidwell is well aware of this issue and try pretty well to address it in the book. I especially appreciated that the author, unlike many other XSLT adopters, doesn't pretend to use XSLT to solve each and every problem, instead it provide good advices and a good amount of common sense on why and where XSLT can be a good choice. The book also include 200+ pages of XSLT and Xpath reference