Rating:  Summary: Not a well written book... Review: ...and not for a beginner. Filled with samples and graphs-which somewhat help the extremely confusing writing style. Bradley's style reminds me of the teacher I had when I was 10 years old who found it very easy to go off on a new tangent--and very difficult to be brief, concise or clear. Fine for a reference, if you already know what you want.
Rating:  Summary: Several reasons for 5 stars Review: 1. Depth and breadth of topics being covered with real application make this a solid reference for XML applications, such as Apache Cocoon 1 & 2 Frameworks. Java is indeed a natural companion to XML.
2. It is not a cookbook of raw XML/XSLT/CSS/XSchema/XLink/XInclude/XPointer, etc... It actually explains the Design behind the implementation leaving one to approach implementation with foresight and focus on planning before one wastes needless hours of frustration during rushed implementations.
3. It is for someone with a solid understanding of MVC (Model/View/Controller) abstraction approaches that are pervasive in OOA/OOD that includes Smalltalk, Objective-C, Java, C++, C#, Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc...
4. It describes XML as a means to be both a boon for turning publishing into an Art of Reuse as well as how XML solidifies many failed attempts of standards that were not able to become language agnostic. XML and all her siblings are that meta bridge.
5. With the XSL Companion those who complained about it being either difficult to grasp or tediously complex will be vindicated and appreciate returning to this book to explain all the questions that surface along the way during any project they become involved in helping solve.
6. Neil is very honest that this book is about wrapping your head around the XML paradigm and not about being a Dictionary of answers to all your XML application(s) needs. It should become clear the reason behind so many XML application standards. There are just so many avenues to address how could they all possibly be expressed in just one book?
Rating:  Summary: Excellent coverage of the topics without useless fluff. Review: A good short book that covered the stuff I wanted to know without using the large type and pictures other series seem to need to make their books thicker. Useful examples and not fixated on using xml as a replacement for html or only for text "publishing" applications.
Rating:  Summary: Handy reference book Review: All reference books should be this short. The XML Companion is generally clear and concise and does a nice job of relating XML to its cousins SGML and HTML. The examples are easy to follow, although the diagrams are often messy--too many arrows pointing this way and that, obscuring parts of the drawing. The charts, tables, and glossary are extremely handy.Unfortunately, two chapters (XLL and XSL) are based on specifications that haven't even become official W3C recommendations yet--why waste the paper and ink on something you know will be outdated by the time the book appears in print? Apparently some marketing bozo at Addison-Wesley decided this was the way to go. Worse, despite its helpful content, every chapter of this book is riddled with typos and other lapses in copyediting and proofreading, which is an embarrassment to the author and a disgrace to the publisher. One expects better of Addison-Wesley--or at least I used to. The proofreader of this book should be whipped, and the project manager should be fired.
Rating:  Summary: Useful and comprehensive Review: Bradley's book is a pretty complete guide to XML and related technologies. The main chapters are almost tutorial in style, with plenty of code examples to follow. The end of the book contains a small reference section. The topics covered are XML, XSL, XSLT, DOM, SAX, XPath, Schemas, XLink, XHTML, and CSS. Discussions are for the most part clear and accurate. I have two main complaints about Bradley. First, the prose, while accurate, is often overly verbose. It could be written more concisely and compactly. Second, each chapter is broken into sections, but the sections are not numbered, so it is difficult to locate material in the text. The main advantage is the comprehensive general coverage of XML-related technologies. Buying this one book will arm you with the knowledge to develop XML applications and content, and it will save you money. If you have very specific needs, you may need to supplement Bradley with another more focused text that delves deeper into a particular technology. Also, if you want to see longer applications presented as case studies, you might want a different text. I recommend this book for beginning and intermediate XML users who want broad, general coverage in a single book.
Rating:  Summary: Useful and comprehensive Review: Bradley's book is a pretty complete guide to XML and related technologies. The main chapters are almost tutorial in style, with plenty of code examples to follow. The end of the book contains a small reference section. The topics covered are XML, XSL, XSLT, DOM, SAX, XPath, Schemas, XLink, XHTML, and CSS. Discussions are for the most part clear and accurate. I have two main complaints about Bradley. First, the prose, while accurate, is often overly verbose. It could be written more concisely and compactly. Second, each chapter is broken into sections, but the sections are not numbered, so it is difficult to locate material in the text. The main advantage is the comprehensive general coverage of XML-related technologies. Buying this one book will arm you with the knowledge to develop XML applications and content, and it will save you money. If you have very specific needs, you may need to supplement Bradley with another more focused text that delves deeper into a particular technology. Also, if you want to see longer applications presented as case studies, you might want a different text. I recommend this book for beginning and intermediate XML users who want broad, general coverage in a single book.
Rating:  Summary: Not a book for a beginner.... Review: Disjointed, vague, not a single good example of XML programming, save your money and go to any XML web site and you will do better
Rating:  Summary: not a starter book, or even a good book Review: don't expect to learn how to use xml from this book. the structure and layout of the material is incomprehensible, doesn't lend itself to self-study and the chapters do not seem to "build on concepts described in previous chapters" (as touted in the preface)--rather, discussing and expounding on specious, irrelevant and unimportant topics. since i obtained this book with the intention of learning xml (and not the incredibly trivial details bradley insists on explicating), i expected to see some (at least one) examples of an actual xml document. no such luck. don't buy this book if you want to know *how* to use xml--total and complete waste of time and money. perhaps it could be of use to some people however. you never know.
Rating:  Summary: Poorly written and explained Review: I bought this book because I was liked the breadth of content covered. There is a lot of content there but I find the style of the author virtually unreadable. He seems completely unable to state a concept clearly and provide a clear example. The text is full of buts and howevers as the author flies off on tangents from the concept being discussed. The book is obviously designed for an advanced audience but that doesn't excuse the lack of clarity. The tangents would be far better suited to different sections or notes to avoid cluttering up the main concepts covered. Also, the examples are rarely well explained and generally consist of small chunks of code that don't illustrate the entire problem. The text would be benefitted by a better structure including more section headings to clarify the topics. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of decent books on XML right now, but this one should be avoided.
Rating:  Summary: Handy and very complete Review: I really liked this book; it starts with what you know (HTML) and works toward this new thing, XML. It even discusses SGML vs. XML, and how they might merge. It isn't full of the bizarre examples I've seen elsewhere; most of the examples are related to familiar typesetting issues. Apparently, the book itself is written in XML and the DTD is provided in an appendix. Other examples concern transforming database information into XML. Finally, there is some useful (if slightly out-of-date) information on parsing XML, including using the Java SAX parser. Basically, this is an XML book done right. It could have more detail in some areas ... but it could also be too big to carry around. I recommend it.
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