XML in a Nutshell, Third Edition

Rating:
Summary: Most will only need a subset
Review: How much XML do you need to know? Me, I read and write XML daily in my programs. But without having to support legacy data, I've found that I can use a very minimal subject to good effect. No mixed content, no attributes in tags, etc. So I can use SAX very easily. And I only need a small subset of this book.

But chances are that you may not be in such an easy situation. You might have to transform XML data using XSLT. While conceptually simple, the details are complex. So the book's section on XSLT can be vital. Another usage context is when you have to do some kind of search within XML data. The purview of XPath, XPointer and XLink. More good stuff to lookup here for explanations.

Harold writes fluently about XML. He has several other well received books on XML. So technically, you can rely on this book to get the details right. But few of you should need to know all of this book. XML has grown vastly, to serve increasingly different and specialised needs. The book tries to address the totality of these needs. So don't be intimidated if you see chapters that you are totally unaware of. I'm in the same boat as you, and so are many others.

Rating:
Summary: This will provide a lot of the info you need...
Review: If you're looking for a single volume on XML to give you many of the answers you need, I would suggest checking out XML In A Nutshell by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means (O'Reilly).

Chapter list: Introducing XML; XML Fundamentals; Document Type Definitions (DTDs); Namespaces; Internationalization; XML as a Document Format; XML on the Web; XSL Transformation (XSLT); XPath; XLinks; XPointers; XInclude; Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO); Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL); XML as a Data Format; XML Schemas; Programming Models; Document Object Model (DOM); Simple API for XML (SAX); XML Reference; Schemas Reference; XPath Reference; XSLT Reference; DOM Reference; SAX Reference; Character Sets; Index

As you can see, there's a lot of ground covered here. Since XML is such a diverse set of standards and technologies, different readers will probably get differing amounts of value from this book. For instance, if I was delving into CSS for a website project, this book wouldn't give me much of what I need. The coverage on CSS is very light and introductory. Conversely, if I was starting to use SAX, the initial chapter on SAX along with the reference chapter would give me a solid foundational base from which to work. It seems that most of the quality material is found in the core XML standards. And as with most Nutshell books, they are not meant to be tutorials for the beginner. They provide a no-fluff reference for the professional to refer back to for quick answers. This book coupled with a stand-alone book on a specific XML standard would be a great combination.

Is it perfect? No. But it will give you a lot of information in a single location that will prevent you from having to comb through multiple other volumes.

Rating:
Summary: What You'll Want On Your Desk.
Review: There's no question that HTML is neat. It tells a web browser how to display text in a way that the writer desired. But, and it's a very big BUT, if you want to go to a web site and get the page, and then extract some data from that page into your own program, you have a problem. The answer is XML.

This page you are reading now has the title of the book on it. The title is in bigger, bolder type. How would you go about extracting the title? It clearly has some kind of HTML commands around it. But they could be bold, strong, em, h1, h2, etc. You'd have to know exactly what the program was putting out and then expect that it never would change.

If it were in XML it would say something like [title]title goes here[/title] (in reality thesquare brackets are angle brackets, just like HTML). You would know exactly what to seach for as the delimiters of the title itself. This is, of course a simplified example, but you get the idea.

This book, typical of an O'Reilly book is professionally written by and for professionals. If it's your task to begin outputting data in XML, this is the essential reference book you'll want on your desk.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Text Book
Review: This books has all what you need to know about XML, simple nice and all examples are in JAVA.

I'm using this book as a text book for my students in Advance web development course

Rating:
Summary: Covers almost every major XML standard
Review: This is a combination field guide and terse standards reference for XML. It covers an amazing variety of XML standards. From the fundamentals of XML, through the document standards, and into transformation technologies like XSLT. Standards include; XML, XPath, XLink, XSLT, XSL-FO, XML Schema, DTDs, among others. The book also cover some standards that use XML, like SAX and DOM.

The book is fairly high level. It assumes that you know the basics and need a complete reference for the technologies. This is that case with all of the Nutshell books, but given the amount of technologies this books cover, the coverage is fairly terse.

The organization of the book is great. There are only a few illustrations and they are used effectively. A solid reference for anyone who works with XML technologies on a daily basis. Highly recommended.