XML by Example (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Useful.. But
Review: I have bought this book back in July, I had no knowledge then of XML. This book was helpful to me. The book is logically organized and moves smoothly from one topic to another. Being a new technology, I think the author did his best to cover and compare all different aspects of XML. I have seen worse books on XML (one is Professional XML by Worx)

The reason is that I didn't give it a five star is for the examples presented in the book: for one reason, the examples started easy but got lengthy and difficult to follow up as the topics got more advanced. Another important reason is that the e-commerce example presented in the last chapter is totally in JAVA and servlets, and I couldn't get the examples to run because I couldn't setup the application to work (being an ASP developer, if the sample application was developing it would have been very useful to me)

One last thing to mention is that I couldn't download the code from the web site ( since the codes are not available with the book)

Rating:
Summary: Good book to start.
Review: This book is excellent for someone who knows HTML basics and who wants to learn XML. The author does not use only examples, but also comparisons, which are really helpful. For example, XML is structure-oriented and not presentation-oriented, compared to HTML, this book explains the advantage of this difference. The presentation is clear, key notions as Namespace, Style Sheets, Dom and Sax, XLink and XPointer are all introduced in chapter one with examples, and explained in more detail in later chapters. It tells you also how to read this book, for example, chapter 3 is a little abstract, and at the beginning of this chapter, the author suggests you to skip half part and read this chapter later. The author repeats some notions several times, it may be helpful for beginner, but not for advanced. This book covers lots of topics, but not in depth. Overall, it is best suited for beginners. Int/adv readers better read <>, <>, <>, <> and other java/asp xml related books.

Rating:
Summary: Not the Right Book
Review: I read the first 6 chapters of the book in 12 hours then I stopped and gave up from it, because I'm lost and got more confused, and I feel like I need much more than that to know what's in there in the XML much more "TRUST ME", well from its name learn by example but it is not the truth, get confused by examples, the examples are so easy to look at but after reading them and read the little tiny bit explanation about them if any, you will get lost and don't know what is the point, don't know why we want to do that, why we need that from the first place ??
I'm not a new programmer but I just started learning XML and I really don't need a book from the very beginning but still I grabbed this book because I thought I needed something to start with,
there isn't enough examples showing clarity
After that I started reading XML Bible 2nd addition, it has a lot of information and it has away too much details about each topic compared to this book but still difficult to read and has lots of Errata !!!.
I'm still looking for a book in XML that makes me really understand Schemas, namespaces, XSL, and XSLT, Xlink, relations between them and CSS,
I'm using xmlSpy and there you go, you will find everything there about how to make XSL, XSD, Schemas and DTD then the XML files and XSL and XSLT which really need to understand how they all work together but you find nothing about them in XML by example book, I'm not saying the book should explain xmlSpy but you have to know all these technologies to work on XML project.
In the end if you think you want to start with this book then don't, read w3c.School and get all the definition for XML technologies then get a much more detailed better book for it which I'm still looking for.

Rating:
Summary: Well planned, but falls short on delivery
Review: Yes, there are a lot of good things about this book. It has one of the largest coverage of XML techiques. The author has organized the chapters of this book in a step by step fashion, some building on knowledge of previous chapters as well as an appropriate gradual increase of difficulty from chapter to chapter, of which I commend the author for. The book showed promise in every respect. However, there are two major fallacies which kept this book from being the best.

First, we know that the author wanted to empasize learning by example through the title. If that is the case, than those examples better be concise and crystal clear. But quite the contrary is true. For one thing, some code examples are just way too long and loses the audience right away. I remember spending ten minutes looking through some of the later examples to see what point the author was trying to make. That should not be the case. Critical areas of the code should at least be highlighted. A lot of the extra code unecessary.

Second, this is not a book for someone with zero knowledge of XML. With such a broad range of information, it is critical for the author to put things in perspective right in the beginning. The author could have easily spent the first two pages telling us roughly what each of these techniques do and whether or not they are dependent or independent of each other rather than finding that out 6 chapters later. I felt like driving in the dark for a while before coming into the light. I would have given this book 4 stars if the author did not mention that this book is suitible for XML newbies, but it definitely serves better as a reference manual for developers with some XML experience who wants to explore new techiques to better serve their purpose.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to read
Review: I have read around 200 pages of this book, usually while traveling. I think the best thing about the book is, it's so easy to read. Its certainly informative and laid out in very simple language with simple examples. Good for beginners or for developers lost reading Heavy XML books. I unsuccessfully tried reading "XML Bible" before I bought this book. Although there are other great books that might go in more details, but if you are a beginner XML developer or manager, this could be a good starting point.

Rating:
Summary: XML by Example
Review: This book is certainly not for beginners. Lots of coding is sometimes very confusing. Some hands-on excercises would have made a great differences. Specially if this book is to be used for some sort of curricullum

Adam

Rating:
Summary: Get to speed with XML -- fast!
Review: Easy to read, still complete and insightful guide to working with XML in the real world. Perhaps with XML, learning by example is the fastest path to becoming a pro.

Rating:
Summary: A quick and clear approach to XML and Internet Basics
Review: This book is excellent for understanding the main features of XML, its utility in Internet applications, and for having an overview of all main market XML products.

If you are new in Internet basics and technologies, this book will make you feel that you are no more lost in the Internet world.

Rating:
Summary: good introduction to XML basics
Review: I wanted to harness XML to automate some of the tedious aspects of producing content for my website, HTML help projects, and inside my commercial software products. I have successfully used DocBook/SGMLtools to produce documents of various types, but I wanted the additional flexibility that XML promises. After all, isn't XML an extension of SGML?

With that simplistic goal in mind (generating boilerplate XML and doing simple transformations), I started scouring the Net in search of a good primer. I ended up with this book to learn the basics.

This book is consciously aimed at readers who have experience and knowledge with HTML, and a passing familiarity with XML. It bills itself as an example hands-on driven informational tutorial. Unfortunately, it falls short, and in my opinion is a little myopic.

The first five chapters of this book lay a good foundation for understanding XML. Unfortunately, it isn't until chapter five, that you are actually (almost indirectly) walked through the process of REALLY using XML. Finding an XSL processor was tedious, requiring several Net searches.

This book effectively presents the basics, and keeps going (far beyond what I wanted to know). It even steps you though building a simple e-commerce solution (with Java and XML).

Compared to the other XML resources I looked at, this one is the best at providing a good introduction. After reading this book you won't be a guru, but you should have a concrete understanding of the basics.

Rating:
Summary: XML by Example, by Benoit Marchal
Review: I am very pleased to have a copy of XML By Example at my desk.

Every time that I have had the need to learn about a new XML related topic I have been able to pick up this book, turn to the related chapter, read a lucid explanation, and then look at an example which truly illustrates the content. This has proven to be a very effective manner for me to learn about XML. The author has done a great job of treating the material with the right balance between abstraction and example. I would highly recommend it to anyone who needs to learn XML/XSL/DOM/SAX concepts.

--steve