Rating: 
Summary: Rather practical!
Review: Where to start? With the concise history of where XML came from and why each design decision was made and how the evolution of specifications took place over the years, or the thorough explanation of all the XML specifications, or the programming and parsing aspects of XML and metadata, or the cool XML timeline poster towards the end of the book? This book has much to offer any person interested in finding out what XML is and why and how it has changed our world. Kenneth B. Sall, the author of this book, organized this book in a fashion where each section could be studied on its own, and if there are references to the previous sections, they are appropriately mentioned. This way, one does not need to sit down and cover this 1000+ page book cover to cover to realize that the topic of conversation is. The stage is set at the beginning by the author commenting on the fact that XML can describe everything under the sun, even the kitchen sink: "XML: ... maybe it's everything but the kitchen sink? Say, have you heard the one about the XML Kitchen Sink Language? ..." I have been working with XML for sometime now, and I am still amazed at how it has grown and expanded in to our everyday lives in the past few years. One can spend months coming up to speed with the specifications and the XML "realm", and that's not enough. This book does not even cover, in a great detail at least, the Web services realm. That alone is a couple of thousand page book. The background topics are essential to any reader: basic XML syntax, DTD, Canonical XML, Namespaces and XML Schema. Once you have these topics covered and well understood, you can jump around to any other part of the book, displaying XML data for example or XML programming API's. One can spend a couple of hours trying to figure out how these specifications fit in, but the author hs already done the job with a very useful picture inside the cover page. What's your forte? Cascading Style Sheets to convert XML data into a PDF document for example, or an XHTML document to display on a web site? XHTML is also covered in length, if you do not know that is and what it offers over the plain old HTML.
My favorite topics were probably the authors explanation of the XML parsing and the available API's and resources. SAX, DOM, JAXP and JDOM are covered in great detail.
* SAX - the API that started it all. Minimal and light-weight. Fast and event driven.
* DOM - Memory intensive, complex, but very powerful. It's a tree based model, and the tree represents the whole document.
* JDOM - java specific. Can be used with either DOM or SAX.
* JAXP - java specific again, but easier to use than JDOM.
There are also a number of C++ XML parsers that the author touches on such as the Apache Xerces, C++ SAX and many others, but the main topics revolve around the four most popular parsers mentioned. These sections are mostly tutorials and how-to's. Each parser is used in an example and example is analyzed piece by piece. DOM is covered in more detail due to the number of levels (DOM level 1-3) that it has. Since DOM is more powerful and more complicated, the topic is a bit more advanced and would require more attention from a novice. If you read thru the SAX chapter and understand it well, DOM would not be that much of hurtle, but make sure that you read understand SAX first. Java centric API's including XML-RPC, JAXB, JDOM, JAXM are covered by the author to depict how XML can be used and how it would benefit the application - and developers in-turn. The icing on the cake is when K. B. Sall outlines the differences between SAX, DOM, JDOM and JSAX. He talks about each of the technologies in detail, tell you what the advantage and disadvantage of each one is, and then it compares them against each other. By the time you are done reading these sections, you would become an expert in XML parsing and programming. XLink and XPointer. How can one leave without these two core technologies and tools? They are truly remarkable; easy to use, light weight and easy to learn. Well, they are well covered - as you would expect from this book. One thing about these topics is that they could be very abstract and need examples, and we got lots of those. The example depict the efficacy of how one can use XLink to create complex connections between sets of resources, even though you do not have a write access to those resources. This is very handy and resourceful technique is you need to build an e-commerce site. With XPointer, one can locate individual XML elements, set of elements or even a range of XML data between two points. The ability to specify "range" of elements is where the true power of XPointer is revealed. The references, the related resources for each topic, simple to complicated examples and a CD filled with goodies, source code used throughout the book and the W3C specifications at your fingertips outline the some of the other benefits of Kenneth B. Sall's "XML Family of Specifications" book.
Rating:
Summary: Rather practical!
Review: Where to start? With the concise history of where XML came from and why each design decision was made and how the evolution of specifications took place over the years, or the thorough explanation of all the XML specifications, or the programming and parsing aspects of XML and metadata, or the cool XML timeline poster towards the end of the book? This book has much to offer any person interested in finding out what XML is and why and how it has changed our world. Kenneth B. Sall, the author of this book, organized this book in a fashion where each section could be studied on its own, and if there are references to the previous sections, they are appropriately mentioned. This way, one does not need to sit down and cover this 1000+ page book cover to cover to realize that the topic of conversation is. The stage is set at the beginning by the author commenting on the fact that XML can describe everything under the sun, even the kitchen sink: "XML: ... maybe it's everything but the kitchen sink? Say, have you heard the one about the XML Kitchen Sink Language? ..." I have been working with XML for sometime now, and I am still amazed at how it has grown and expanded in to our everyday lives in the past few years. One can spend months coming up to speed with the specifications and the XML "realm", and that's not enough. This book does not even cover, in a great detail at least, the Web services realm. That alone is a couple of thousand page book. The background topics are essential to any reader: basic XML syntax, DTD, Canonical XML, Namespaces and XML Schema. Once you have these topics covered and well understood, you can jump around to any other part of the book, displaying XML data for example or XML programming API's. One can spend a couple of hours trying to figure out how these specifications fit in, but the author hs already done the job with a very useful picture inside the cover page. What's your forte? Cascading Style Sheets to convert XML data into a PDF document for example, or an XHTML document to display on a web site? XHTML is also covered in length, if you do not know that is and what it offers over the plain old HTML.
My favorite topics were probably the authors explanation of the XML parsing and the available API's and resources. SAX, DOM, JAXP and JDOM are covered in great detail.
•SAX - the API that started it all. Minimal and light-weight. Fast and event driven.
•DOM - Memory intensive, complex, but very powerful. It's a tree based model, and the tree represents the whole document.
•JDOM - java specific. Can be used with either DOM or SAX.
•JAXP - java specific again, but easier to use than JDOM.
There are also a number of C++ XML parsers that the author touches on such as the Apache Xerces, C++ SAX and many others, but the main topics revolve around the four most popular parsers mentioned. These sections are mostly tutorials and how-to's. Each parser is used in an example and example is analyzed piece by piece. DOM is covered in more detail due to the number of levels (DOM level 1-3) that it has. Since DOM is more powerful and more complicated, the topic is a bit more advanced and would require more attention from a novice. If you read thru the SAX chapter and understand it well, DOM would not be that much of hurtle, but make sure that you read understand SAX first. Java centric API's including XML-RPC, JAXB, JDOM, JAXM are covered by the author to depict how XML can be used and how it would benefit the application - and developers in-turn. The icing on the cake is when K. B. Sall outlines the differences between SAX, DOM, JDOM and JSAX. He talks about each of the technologies in detail, tell you what the advantage and disadvantage of each one is, and then it compares them against each other. By the time you are done reading these sections, you would become an expert in XML parsing and programming. XLink and XPointer. How can one leave without these two core technologies and tools? They are truly remarkable; easy to use, light weight and easy to learn. Well, they are well covered - as you would expect from this book. One thing about these topics is that they could be very abstract and need examples, and we got lots of those. The example depict the efficacy of how one can use XLink to create complex connections between sets of resources, even though you do not have a write access to those resources. This is very handy and resourceful technique is you need to build an e-commerce site. With XPointer, one can locate individual XML elements, set of elements or even a range of XML data between two points. The ability to specify "range" of elements is where the true power of XPointer is revealed. The references, the related resources for each topic, simple to complicated examples and a CD filled with goodies, source code used throughout the book and the W3C specifications at your fingertips outline the some of the other benefits of Kenneth B. Sall's "XML Family of Specifications" book.
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