Excellent Book - Excellent Content
This book hit the spot for me. They provide a wealth of ideas and recommendations on how to create well structured, reusable XML schemas, along with good guidelines on the various strengths and weaknesses of different choices. It definitely gave me a lot of good information, and a good feeling for what is possible and what is important in designing XML data models. It's not an easy read, as it requires a reasonable comfort with XML Schema, and the terminology is fairly technical, but once you get used to their style, it's quite clear.
Meagre content disguised by vague writing and padding
There isn't much real content in this book and you have to trudge through a lot of vague and cumbersome writing to get to it.
Here's a representative extract:
"What should be obvious to any practitionaer is that effective engineering of a schema requires expertise with metadata and related data archtitecture disciplines. Wihtout a metadata and data architecture focus, the broad proliferation of nonstandard and ad hoc XML transactions and schemas will be seen, resulting in increased data disparity, integration complexity, and a failure to reduce related technology costs." (page 197)
It also has a very poorly produced index, which makes it far less useful than it might have been as a XML schema reference book.
Excellent resource for my needs
At first I was somewhat skeptical due to a couple of negative reviews. However, I was desparate. The other XML books I've read (and fallen asleep with) seem to be restatements of the W3C specifications. I am a DBA/Data Architect in the midst of an international Web Services and SOA project and I needed something fast. As it turns out, this was probably the best investment in reference materials I've made in a long time. I guess I am not really sure what the other reviewers missed, but this book was perfect for me. I hold mixed roles of DBA as well as Data Architect - data modelling mostly. Recently, I was tasked with trying to determine why and how all of this XML stuff fits in a SOA project, and from the data perspective. Although I've been a DBA for too many years to share, I've positioned myself mostly at the persistence layer. This book really opened my eyes. Thorough, concise, and very focused on what "data folks" need. Five stars were a must for me.
This book is not ... a lot of things
The content of the book is very appealing, but I found many problems:
- a good knowledge of XML schema is required
- a good knowledge of data modeling topics is required
If you have the required knowledge, you will find a lot of obvious things, that you maybe already know. Some hints and methodologies are useful, but they represent only a small portion of the book.
If you don't have the required knowledge, you will find difficult understanding the "big picture" from which the ideas in the book are derived.
I don't suggest buying this book.
What a Waste of Time & Money !
I must not have gotten the same book that the other reviewers got. I rarely write bad reviews. I've normally researched the books I buy pretty thoroughly. But I screwed up this time
It reminded of those "C" language style guide books. Some people get into that stuff I guess....
(11 reviews)
