Verbose
I bought Harold's book to help me move from XHTML to XML and to handle data with PHP which does not fit well in a relational database / SQL. This book bogs down quickly in very long explanations & examples which could have been a fraction of the size. I think it has good coverage, but Harold uses too many words every time he approaches a subject. To paraphrase someone else, Harold could write 10,000 words on the color red.
The problem with Wiley's Bible series (I have several of them) is that the goal seems to be to make them as big and heavy as a boat anchor. This results in verbose books, which may be ok for use as a reference but way to hard to read cover to cover for initial learning. The time needed to read these books cover to cover exceeds the value of the book itself. If you buy books by the pound (or kilo), this is a good buy. But if you value your time more than you value impressive size, there are better alternatives.
On a positive note: I have not found a bunch of typo or editing errors and Harold seems to know the subject. I'm just frustrated by the slow pace, although I will continue trying to read it at least a little longer.
Warning: [Some opinions given here appear to be by paid reviewers. ie: Feb 3, 2005, and others. How many others are also raw attempts to sell books without honor? Can you trust anyone who writes hundreds or thousands of 5 star opinions?? Heck no! Hint: Check out the person writing the review before actually reading it. Look for how many opinions he/she writes and how many stars. Distrust all high opinions in the first few months after publication, all high opinions by people who have only written a couple of opinions, and all high opinions from people who only write high opinions. Thanks for the lack of honesty Elliotte &/or Wiley &/or big A. (my opinion, 2 cma).]
Doesn't cover DOM and SAX
I haven' read the book, only browsed its TOC. It doesn't cover the Document Object Model (DOM) and the Simple API for XML (SAX). It also discusses CSS in too much detail. These days, web development professionals will probably have a knowledge of both HTML and CSS before starting with XML.
Consider "Beginning XML" or "Professional XML" instead, both published by Wrow.
Pulp paper
I have purchased many books from Amazon, but this one is printed on the lowest-quality paper I've ever experienced. Though it's relatively new, the yellowed pages look like a 1960's pulp novel. There is literally a 2mm yellow border surrounding each page. Come on "Hungry Minds" publishers, you can do better than this.
Sola Scriptura
Review for XML 1.1 Bible (3rd Edition):
Elliotte Rusty Harold is that rare technical author who can write about anything and make it interesting. In this case, he has written 1,000 pages on XML providing us with an excellent guide book to this technology. Whether you are a beginner or advanced user of XML, there will be something in this book for you.
The book is divided into five parts. The first part discusses the basics of XML giving us an introduction to what XML is, what it is used for, and explaining the basics of creating a well-formed XML document. Part two discusses DTDs and explains how namespaces are used. Part three looks at various style languages including CSS and XSL. The section on CSS will be useful to anyone wishing to use CSS to format their HTML documents. Part four gives us a tour of some supplemental XML technologies including XLinks, XPointers, XInclude, and Schemas. The chapter that most interested me was on Schemas and the explanations were clear and complete, leaving no mystery about how to use this technology. The final part looks at a few XML applications including XHTML, RDDL, and SVG. The book does not cover writing programs to process XML documents using SAX or DOM, for example. The author has another book on that topic if that is of interest to you.
Each part of the book does an exceptional job of explaining the topic. The author gives us plenty of examples to make the text crystal clear. The author writes as a colleague helping out fellow programmers and not as an instructor droning away at a blackboard. You really get the idea that the author enjoys XML and enjoys explaining it. If you are interested in working with XML this book is truly an indispensable guide.
Surprisingly Good, Surprisingly Useful
When I first saw this book I thought that someone must be kidding. There's no question that XML is clearly the language to use when you want to transfer data using the standard web communications protocols. But a book that's more than a thousand pages, get serious.
They I opened it, low and behold, links, style sheets, specialized forms of XML for specialized purposes that have been agreed upon by multiple competing companies. It turns out that there's a lot more to XML than I thought.
Then in conjunction with XML other languages have been developed, some have proved not so useful and have faded away, others have evolved and changed to be more useful.
All in all, this is a very useful book, well written and has given me some ideas about how to solve some problems. That's all you can ask out of a book.
(67 reviews)
