Rating: 
Summary: Quality book with CD worth its weight in gold
Review: Having the Michael Kay book and with some XSL transformation experience under my belt, I sincerely wish I had this book earlier. XSL transformations operate unlike any other programming or document transformation language. For most of us, it is a jarring agony to learn.The book starts at the basics in a non-abstract way (unlike the Kay book) and builds your knowledge from the simple to the complex. The author's real-world experience shows to great effect here. He will take an example and build on it, not only illuminating new techniques, but thereby showing the power of XSLt to transform the same data in multiple ways. The CD is worth its weight in gold. It is very convenient to have the code on hand of course, but the author goes beyond that. You get each definition in the W3C specification accompanied by an example with suggestions to alter the example to deepen your understanding. One weakness of the presentation is that readers are left to their own devices in downloading, installing, and learning a transformation engine to actually carry out experiments. This is a weakness in a book so superbly directed at the beginning and intermediate level. By the way, the slap at the quality of English in this book is completely false and is probably what prompted me to write this review in the first place.
Rating: 
Summary: Learning XSLT made difficult thru cryptic writing
Review: I felt frustrated after the first 100 pages. The writer completely lost me after I struggled thru from page 50 or so! He seemed more interested in starting off each chapter with quotes by Chuang Ji and I don't know how the words in the quotes related to the topic, though only the quotes seemed interesting than the presentation of XSLT by the author. The book started off nicely in simple English and things were placed in perspective. Examples of the various nodes were shown in diagrams too, but that alone spanned over 25 pages! Chapter 3 became an overview of the real world example of XSLT works, the Chapter 4 was what shredded me to pieces. From then on, the writer didn't seem interested in helping the reader understand XSLT in clear simple words, instead used cryptic language with jargon. Mr. Fung just failed to help readers to nail down the cryptic symbols in an otherwise easy XSL transformation process! Elizabeth Castro did a real wonderful job in her book on XML in explaining XSLT and XPath.
Rating:
Summary: Nice examples of XML implementation...
Review: I have been tinkering with XML in conjunction with Web Application Architecture over the past few years. This book has provided me with great examples of how to effectively implement XML solutions. In the very least, it has provided me great inspiration. However, the author's unrelated Zen like comments and quotes strewn throughout the book bothered me.
Rating: 
Summary: unnecessarily complicated
Review: I've had problems reading this book from the very beginning. Very simple things (for example, DTD) are presented and explained in a very complicated form. When there's a relationship between two notions, it is often shown in a rather clumsy way. The writing style is far from flowing. Some people may enjoy this book, but it feels like the author tried to write a book on higher algebra. Parsing of an XML document is explained with trees and a multitude of diagrams, which would've worked fine if it wasn't taken to the level of extreme abstraction. I wouldn't recommend this book, but from other reviews it seems this approach works for some people.
Rating: 
Summary: Well written & organized, great learning tool
Review: Just to put my two cents in perspective: As an untrained wanna-be hacker, I'm always getting in over my head with programming languages. I know just enough about scripting and XML to get into trouble. The problem with most books for me is that somewhere they assume that I understand something I don't, with the result that I inevitably hit a rather hard wall. No such problem (so far with) with this book. For my purposes, it's one of the most successful programming books I've used. I think it works because: - The author has focused on XML-HTML transformation of web documents, using a simple, non-Microsoft-centric approach. This is exactly what I want to do with my web site. Most books on XSLT try to cover everything, from B2B data to Braille to WAP. - Don't let the name fool you - this guy writes more clearly than most authors with Anglo surnames. He's a joy to read. Serious programmers should note that this is not about server-based enterprise solutions. It's a low tech approach for the rest of us.
Rating:
Summary: This book is terrible
Review: The only reason I didn't give the book five stars was the incredible number of mistakes in it. I have been studying XSLT for some time now and bought this book to fill out my knowledge and to evaluate it for use by my team of web developers. Khun Yee Fung's approach is much cleaner in many ways from the "XSLT Programmer's Reference." His method of showing how the transformation nodes get copied into the result tree before processing is very enlightening. His writing style is generally clean and his examples are very carefully expanded from simple to complex. If you are looking for a reference guide then this book is not "it." If you are knowledgeable about XML and are just starting to learn about XSLT, this book will get you up and running quickly. Make sure you take the coding examples with salt, as they and the text contain many mistakes. There are cases where the XSLT programs don't exactly match the example XML. There are cases where the XSLT is missing an important piece (or is subtly wrong). In nearly all cases careful reading of the text should bring you to the proper code, regardless of the text. I have not studied the code on the included CD to see if the mistakes from the text are reproduced there. Often with a technical book the CD is produced much later in the development cycle so it the mistakes may have been caught. If this is so, the web site for the book doesn't mention it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for beginners, but with lots of mistakes
Review: The only reason I didn't give the book five stars was the incredible number of mistakes in it. I have been studying XSLT for some time now and bought this book to fill out my knowledge and to evaluate it for use by my team of web developers. Khun Yee Fung's approach is much cleaner in many ways from the "XSLT Programmer's Reference." His method of showing how the transformation nodes get copied into the result tree before processing is very enlightening. His writing style is generally clean and his examples are very carefully expanded from simple to complex. If you are looking for a reference guide then this book is not "it." If you are knowledgeable about XML and are just starting to learn about XSLT, this book will get you up and running quickly. Make sure you take the coding examples with salt, as they and the text contain many mistakes. There are cases where the XSLT programs don't exactly match the example XML. There are cases where the XSLT is missing an important piece (or is subtly wrong). In nearly all cases careful reading of the text should bring you to the proper code, regardless of the text. I have not studied the code on the included CD to see if the mistakes from the text are reproduced there. Often with a technical book the CD is produced much later in the development cycle so it the mistakes may have been caught. If this is so, the web site for the book doesn't mention it.
Rating:
Summary: The best XSLT book to start with
Review: This is the most beginner-friendly book on XSLT I am aware of. It is written in simple language devoid of XML infamous dreadful terminology. It implies neither the reader's significant Computer Science background, nor outstanding brain power. Explanations are as clear and simple as possible, with lots of illustrations. 1-star reviewers remarks about "cryptic writing" and "higher algebra" are egregiously misaddressed (though entertaining :).
Rating:
Summary: XSLT: Working with XML and HTML
Review: Uniquely efficient presentation of the topic. A necessary and sufficient description of the 20% of XSLT that is used in 80% of applications. Perfect use of extended graphics for the tree handling basics in Part II, which by itself justifies purchase. This is one of a handful of books I've run across in 20 years that takes the reader to an intermediate level in almost no time. (Frank Pagan's slim book on Formal Definition of Programming Languages is another.) Consensus among colleagues is that the Fung book for jump-start plus the Michael Kay (2nd ed) book for reference is the XSLT library to have. One wishes this author would write on other topics.
Rating:
Summary: XSLT: Working with XML and HTML
Review: Uniquely efficient presentation of the topic. A necessary and sufficient description of the 20% of XSLT that is used in 80% of applications. Perfect use of extended graphics for the tree handling basics in Part II, which by itself justifies purchase. This is one of a handful of books I've run across in 20 years that takes the reader to an intermediate level in almost no time. (Frank Pagan's slim book on Formal Definition of Programming Languages is another.) Consensus among colleagues is that the Fung book for jump-start plus the Michael Kay (2nd ed) book for reference is the XSLT library to have. One wishes this author would write on other topics.
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