What's this about?
I haven't clue what this book is about and how it relates to real life problem solving. I use SAX2 and DOM parsers daily and they are an integral part of my software projects. I fond this book to be a total waste of time and money and I would not, could not recommend it. The O'Reilly Book on the other hand it a gem
Too basic, too much irrelevant material
There are some useful nuggets in this book, but there is also a lot of material that doesn't directly relate to processing XML. The author spends an inordinate amount of space discussing things like AWK, filename globbing on Windows, installing software, and other irrelevant items. The software tools used as examples in the book were written for earlier versions of Python and the Python XML libraries; they do not work with the current releases of Python and PyXML, and no updates are available on the author's web site.
expensive and still loaded with typos and other errors
This book proves that a good publisher makes a difference, and that prentice hall does not qualify. I've never seen a computer book that contains so many errors. Combined with the hideous layout of the goldfarb series, this should be enough to keep you far away from it. BTW: i've added a second star, because valuable stuff is hidden in it; you just have to work too hard to get there.If you're new to python, buy learning python and programming python instead. if you want to apply xml with python, use the web to learn more. Only buy this book if it's *deeply* discounted, or if you're looking for job as a book editor. Otherwise, you'll end up rewarding incompetent publishing.
Some good info, but misses the mark
Modern XML programmers should be using the SAX and DOM api's for their projects, and the related standards. Those subjects should have been the foundation for this book.Instead the author spends lots of time talking about some "pyxie" utility that reforms XML into some intermediate line oriented ascii format for processing. He even does system calls to assist in processing. If SAX and DOM didn't exist, then yes, I suppose this is how you'd do it. This would be OK for 10% of the book, as an introduction, but not as the primary tool.
To be fair, he does talk about SAX and DOM in a couple chapters. The coverage was light and the examples weren't great.
And no discussion of XSLT or XPath? Nor of schemas? To be fair the copyright says 2000, so this may have been written in 1999, so some of those items were not around or popular back then. But if the book is updated, these would need to be added.
I think readers might do better to grab one of the Java books for now, and try to translate to Python in their head I guess. I agree with one of the other reviewers that there's a bit of filler in the book, though not as bad as some other books.
On the plus side the author is very polite and supportive and would be comforting to newer programmers.
I also like the way he keeps extending his xgrep project to have more and more features; it is nice to see an author show a large project evolving (I just kept wishing it was using DOM).
Disappointing
Very little coverage of processing XML documents using Python - plenty of discussion of Python generally, how to use C language utilities to parse XML, how to use awk to modify the output of the C language tools, etc. The book uses a large typeface and includes examples for both Linux and Windows NT screen input/output (which turn out to be nearly identical), so there's not nearly as much content as you might imagine from the page count. I'm relatively new to XML and Python and I spotted two errors in the examples within the first 100 pages. There are two appendices which sound like they're supposed to explain Python to Java and Perl programmers but turn out to be feature comparisons. That's great fodder for flamewars about language superiority, but not a big help for people with experience in other languages seeking a Python jump-start. People who shell out $() for a book on XML and Python don't need a sales pitch about why XML and Python are good choices.I think this book could have been saved with some help from a good editor; unfortunately, that wasn't done. I can't comment on the CD as I haven't opened its envelope, as this book is being returned as totally unsatisfactory, which I don't do very often.
(11 reviews)
