XForms Essentials

Rating:
Summary: Essential XForms read
Review: The author is a member of the W3C XForms Working Group, so he knows what he is talking about. This guide is a great starting point for getting to grips with XForms whether or not you are already familiar with HTML forms. This is a much better place to start than the XForms spec, which is pretty impenetrable to your average forms author. Micah takes you through the basics, shows you where XForms fits with other W3C standards, and gets you started with authoring. Once you are feeling a bit more confident this book serves as an excellent reference. One of the really nice things about the book is that there isn't too much of it. It gives a good grounding in the subject without any waffle. In the course of my work I have spoken to several others who have similarly found Micah’s book to be an essential starting point to XForms, and a solid reference book.

Rating:
Summary: Read the W3C documents instead.
Review: This book is a poor introduction to XForms. In a text that is only slightly larger than a pamphlet, the author attempts to do much more than simply introduce XForms, and the result is that nothing ends up being explained well.

The relatively few pages of the author's own creation are written in a prose so terse that in some places it reads like gibberish, and the rest of the text is a reference that repeats what is available in the W3C XForms and XPath specifications and the XForms for HTML Authors document.

Rating:
Summary: Superb Book
Review: XForms is, very quietly, changing the way that we view the web, putting it on a much more solid XML based footing. While the specification is difficult to comprehend at the best of times, the power of the specification is such that it provides a solid basis on which to build the XML web.

Micah Dubinko's book cuts through a great deal of complexity of the form and illustrates in clear, concise examples how the most critical features are used, elucidates much of the reasoning behind how certain features evolved (a bonus coming from his days helming the XForms specification itself) and otherwise provides a thorough yet easy to understand introduction to what is undoubtably one of the most important specifications to come out of the W3C.

My company is using XForms to build significant portions of our infrastructure upon my guidance, and I hand a copy of this book out to each one of my programmers. If you deal with XML at all, this book should absolutely be part of your library.

Kurt Cagle
Chief Technology Architect
Seattle Book Company
and Author (SVG Programming, XQuery Kickstart, Beginning XML, etc.)