The Name Says it All
I found this book useful in getting started with XML, as it was the easiest to understand. It only covers XML and DTDs, not XSL, CSS, Xlink etc. Everything is spoon fed, and it assumes no programming knowledge. Still if you master the contents, you will have a reasonable basic knowledge of XML.
world record for poor proof reading
I have never read a book so littered with mistakes. To a neophyte this book must be so confusing as to be totally useless. Can you believe the author gives three different renderings of the acronym SGML within a few pages of each other. Many absolutely critical points are muffed by the most banal and obvious proof reading errors. The final straw is the tear out reference card which can't even get the rules for XML names correct. Really, it's just too, too bad.
good for nonprogrammers
This is an easy to read and understand guide to desigining and writing XML documents. It doesn't cover the programming half of the problem at all, not even mentioning popular XML parsers for various programming languages. So it's not complete for learning how to build systems that use XML. As befits a "Complete Idiot's Guide", it has a lot of redundancy. Maybe that's so you can understand what's going on no matter where you start in the book. There are some proofreading problems (wrong fonts, missing letters and punctuation, wrong words in examples) which suggest it was rushed out the door.
Can't even define EDI right
To most of the world, EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange. In this book, however, it stands for Electronic Document Interchange. The author's explanation of ED and its pros and cons are ridiculously simplistic and incomplete. I didn't expect this book to go into much detail about EDI, but I expected the information it did give to be accurate. This error makes me question the validity of the rest of the book. I'll find another resource, thanks.
For idiots alright.
Everything in this book could be reduced to 20 pages including examples. Every idea is repeated over and over. Someone gave this book a glowing review, and said they finished in four days. A book you can finish in four days is cotton candy. Although the author makes several claims to show "XML in the real world", there is not one actual example of how you could use an XML file (how would you display this file on the net, or import it into Word, or whatever). The only thing the book covers is the structure of an XML file, and that not very well. And while the book trumpets the XML Pro editor, it's just a trial version of a product that the author wants to sell you. You pay $25 to read an ad for a product that costs $150. How is this even legal? And despite the reviews, this editor has limited value. It can help show the structure of an existing file, and can be useful for creating the structure of a new file. But if you create a file with say 20 elements per item, and 50 instances of the item, you would spend the entire day creating a file that would take 20 minutes with a normal data entry system. If you really want to learn about XML, get a real book.
(9 reviews)