Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: A very thorough tutorial with plenty of sample code
Review: ... you find some glaring technical errors.

Part of me wonders if the technical editors were even paying attention to the details in the book. I've found a bunch of errors in the first five chapters alone. I'm not talking about grammar errors (there are plenty of those too), but errors in the code, errors in the descriptions, places in the text where it says to use the wrong codes. Basically I'm not very happy with this book so far and am now looking for another book.

This book is generally well-written, and there may be good information contained in it. The problem is that there are enough obvious errors to make me wonder about the rest of it.

Rating:
Summary: Where to begin? Too many negative points to list.
Review: Admittedly, XML is not a mature technology, and a thorough treatment (or even introduction) to the changing landscape of XML is a challenge. But this book fell far too short of its goal.

Too many inconsistencies to ignore. Many "refer to" captions where the code or screenshot did not match the comment. Some supporting information was only depicted in these missing items, so of course, the reader was left with no context for the caption.

Too many code samples that did not work. Speaking of code samples, this book had the smallest amount of samples I've seen in any of the "21 Days" books I have read (6). The code samples included did not begin to describe the text of the book. For example, in the DOM chapter, the author listed roughly 20 properites and 20 methods--yet only two properties, and one method were shown via code samples. Thoroughly disappointing. Further, the author chose to describe only Microsoft's implementation of the DOM! Odd, yes, even odder when you read below that in a later chapter, the author eschews the parser he already told you to download so he can explain the SAX in Java.

Let me intersperse a semi-positive comment in the sea of negative ones. The author is clearly a good writer--sentences are well-constructed, and the author is good with words. Unfortunately, he is not as good at instructing.

Another problem--the book was published in August 2001, but is already out of date. How can this be? Obviosuly, many chapters were written long ago, and were not rewritten to address any new specifications or emerging standards. While DTD's and XDR are still used, I feel that XSD should have been covered in much more detail--after all, it's the W3C's recommendation, so it should be emphasized.

Another general annoyance: I got sick of seeing text like this: "we haven't covered these features, but. . . " when commenting on the sparse sample code provided.

Chapter on SAX: useless to me. Why? I don't know Java. Instead of using the MSXML parser used throughout the rest of the book, the author chose to use Sun's Java parser for the SAX chapter. I have no clue why. Plenty of code samples in this chapter--kudos! In fact 65% of the chapter was samples--too bad I don't know Java.

Scope was also a problem. For example, namespaces is an easy concept to understand, but the author spent 15 pages explaining them. XSD, a little more difficult to understand, but didn't receive much more attention.

I could go on, but I will spare you. Postive side: author is clearly a good writer, and some chapters were top notch. But the inconsistencies were disturbing--detail, skim, detail, skim. In the author's defense, this is an evolving topic, and a thorough, current treatment is next to impossible. I suspect that only Wrox's multiple author approach could do XML justice at this stage of the game.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to read and chock full of examples
Review: Again the Teach Yourself in 21 Days series comes through. This book is very easy to understand. A great place to begin your XML journey.

Rating:
Summary: Much too wordy in all the wrong places
Review: I usually don't say anything unless I have something nice to say, but I feel the positive reviews for this book are highly overrated. I'm quite stunned by how much copy the author of this book managed to churn out on what otherwise could have been a concise and to-the-point tutorial. Do I really need to read through 7 paragraphs on the decision-making process of the W3C before I can learn about XML schemas...? While some may find that kind of information thorough, I find it distracting. The reviewers who feel this book was well-written obviously don't think good writing should be compelling. The writing style, while organized and grammatically correct, is very very dry and repetitious. The tone reminds me of the more boring professors I had in college. There is no humor or person-to-person feel you get with writers like Laura Lemay. Even given the author's verbosity, the book (almost flagrantly) glosses over what I felt should have been the most important lesson: the XSD schema language, which most people agree to be the standard syntax for XML. If you want an efficient introduction to XML, you are better off running through the online tutorials offered on the w3schools website.

Rating:
Summary: Best Survey of XML on the Market
Review: I was looking for a book that would introduce XML and show me some real code examples of how to use it. I got that and more from this book. It is really well written - the author is more than a techies, he knows how to write and present complex concepts in understandable language.

There is a lot of material in this book. As the author points out, this is a 21-day study of XML, you can't cover every single aspect of every one of the many technologies that are part of the XML family of tools, but somehow this book manages to cover the most useful of waht is available.

There is something for everyone in this book. If you like to write Java, there are examples in Java, there are also examples in JavaScript, VBScript, VB, various databases and three or four different browsers. The parsers used include Saxon, Xalan, XT, MSXML, Apache, and all sorts of others. Best of all, as the author points out, if you can appreciate the relatively simple underlying constructs, it really doesn't matter what language you choose to write in. This is excellent since it helps to prove that XML is platform agnostic and can be programmed in almost any language and used in almost any toolset.

We have used some of the code out examples right out of the book to create a data-centric XML application for transaction exchange. The best part of this is that our business partners have different platforms and different programming environments and that doesn't matter at all, since we are all speaking XML when it comes to exchanging data. I learned how to do this by reading this book and working along with the examples provided.

My only regret with regard to this book is that it didn't include more than 21 days worth of material - I would have liked 42 days! This was such a good read, I found myself wanting more at the end of it.

I really got my money's-worth and more from this book, recommend it highly and can't wait to read whatever this author writes next. If you are looking for a very well-written survey of fundamental XML concepts, that covers a wide variety of the basic technologies, and touches various tools and platforms - try this book.

Rating:
Summary: Best Survey of XML on the Market
Review: I was looking for a book that would introduce XML and show me some real code examples of how to use it. I got that and more from this book. It is really well written - the author is more than a techies, he knows how to write and present complex concepts in understandable language.

There is a lot of material in this book. As the author points out, this is a 21-day study of XML, you can't cover every single aspect of every one of the many technologies that are part of the XML family of tools, but somehow this book manages to cover the most useful of waht is available.

There is something for everyone in this book. If you like to write Java, there are examples in Java, there are also examples in JavaScript, VBScript, VB, various databases and three or four different browsers. The parsers used include Saxon, Xalan, XT, MSXML, Apache, and all sorts of others. Best of all, as the author points out, if you can appreciate the relatively simple underlying constructs, it really doesn't matter what language you choose to write in. This is excellent since it helps to prove that XML is platform agnostic and can be programmed in almost any language and used in almost any toolset.

We have used some of the code out examples right out of the book to create a data-centric XML application for transaction exchange. The best part of this is that our business partners have different platforms and different programming environments and that doesn't matter at all, since we are all speaking XML when it comes to exchanging data. I learned how to do this by reading this book and working along with the examples provided.

My only regret with regard to this book is that it didn't include more than 21 days worth of material - I would have liked 42 days! This was such a good read, I found myself wanting more at the end of it.

I really got my money's-worth and more from this book, recommend it highly and can't wait to read whatever this author writes next. If you are looking for a very well-written survey of fundamental XML concepts, that covers a wide variety of the basic technologies, and touches various tools and platforms - try this book.

Rating:
Summary: The worst Sams book I have ever read
Review: I would like to say this book is the worst Sams teach yourself books I have ever read. Although the book is pretty well organized, it lacks lots details, any beginner for XML will find this book hard to follow. All examples the book gives is just like excerpt from author's notebook. For example, if you want to try some of example, you will find you fail again and again. Few example is complete.

There are also lot's mistake in this book. Give an example, page 144~145 people.dtd and person.xml, in both dtd and xml files there is "<!DOCTYPE People ..." declaration, this is not allowed in dtd file since xml file referenced people.dtd. I don't know how author could make this kind of mistake. The author should have added <?xml version='1.0' encoding='us-ascii'> to the dtd file also. For the first time XML learner, if you fail to add a little bit detail somewhere, the reader would take one day to try to find how.

I won't recommend this book any beginner to read this this XML book. Sams book is always target for beginner, but this book is ridiculous.

Rating:
Summary: Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days, 2nd Ed.
Review: Some titles tout - "Learn blah, blah in 24 hours" - but I found that this book offers a concise series of 21 lessons that were painless. It is written in such a way that I was able to just dive in and get started. The book provides clear and easy to understand exercises and examples that really worked for me! Such topics as XSL, XSLT, XPath, DOM, XLink, XPointer, XML Schema, and DTD are explained so that I knew how they are used, and when. The book also contains excellent and up to date resources.

This is a very useful and practical first book for beginners, those with HTML knowledge, or those who are curious about a technology that is transforming the Web. If you are interested in certification or just want a background in XML, this is a good book to start with.

Rating:
Summary: Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days, 2nd Ed.
Review: Some titles tout - "Learn blah, blah in 24 hours" - but I found that this book offers a concise series of 21 lessons that were painless. It is written in such a way that I was able to just dive in and get started. The book provides clear and easy to understand exercises and examples that really worked for me! Such topics as XSL, XSLT, XPath, DOM, XLink, XPointer, XML Schema, and DTD are explained so that I knew how they are used, and when. The book also contains excellent and up to date resources.

This is a very useful and practical first book for beginners, those with HTML knowledge, or those who are curious about a technology that is transforming the Web. If you are interested in certification or just want a background in XML, this is a good book to start with.

Rating:
Summary: Recommend
Review: Wonderful book if you have enough time to type all codes. No CD comes with this book, no source codes available.