Best Book Ever if you want to truly learn XSLT and XPATH
I love this book, they are no longer printing this book, but if you can grab it, grab it! It's truly amazing. Love this book and it comes with a CD.
Excellent XSLT reference!
I've had this book on my shelf since publication. I had to dig it out last week to do some fairly complex XSLT programming. The book was a huge help and helped me get everything done quite quickly.
I use this book as a reference book, not a how-to. This book is great for things like "what is the function that does 'x' and what are its arguments?" It probably helps that I know XML pretty deeply, so I don't typically look at the examples. Of course, that might be because the docs on the functions in the book are so good that I find I don't need to look at the examples.
XSLT hasn't changed much since this book was published. If you deal with XSLT, and, by extension, XPATH, get this book for reference.
Poor Editing, Poor Examples
This feels like a book that had it's table of contents laid out, and then the content filled in as quickly as possible. Editing must have lasted about 3 days. With a more thorough editing process, and a bit more thought to the examples (the boulevard examples taumatized me so much, I nearly stopped driving), it may have been a very good book. In some sections, the same paragraph is repeated verbatim 2 or even 3 times. Often in the chapter overview, and then on the next page in the first chapter section.
Possibly the book appeals to other learning styles better, but I've found it a tough slog. In fairness though, XSLT is a strange and difficult beast- I may be transferring some of my frustration on to the messenger!
However, in general, I find the examples are too repetive, causing them to blur together. And you find myself flipping back as many as 6 pages at times to find the xml code the description is talking about.
And there is a lack of technical illustrations to help with more difficult topics.
I would have appreciate larger examples from different domains to specific goals. The problem with a lot of the examples is the purposelessness of the examples.
XML in a Nutshell, and Michael Kay's XLST reference have provided me much more joy.
My last word of advice- follow the examples live. XSLT and XPath need practice, and lots of it.
Examples are laden with errors
I suppose this book might be helpful as a reference, but to someone who is actually trying to figure out what to do with xslt and xpath, this book is a very poor primer. I found that, in addition to offering little explanation as to how xpath and xslt are needed in a larger context (is this supposed to supplant sql??, for example), the examples are so error-prone that I learned more by correcting the errors than I did reading the book. Here is a list of errors you will encounter (from the CD) for the first 3 chapters:1.1 (string not quoted)
1.2 (only 1 top-level element allowed).
2.1 (invalid character)
2.4 (cannot locate resource)
2.5 (template.xml undeclared namespace)
2.7 (cannot locate resource)
3.2 (output.xml invalid at the top level)
3.3 ditto
3.4 worked -- hey, a working example!
3.5 (output.xml invalid at the top level)
3.6 misplaced period
3.7 invalid at top level
3.8 only 1 top level element allowed
3.9 invalid at the top level...
The rest of the chapter examples are similar to this one.
Without good examples, a programming book is almost worthless.
Not too many good examples, but a decent reference
I would agree this is more of a reference for the seasoned XPath/XSLT programmer. I'm a intermediate java programmer with some decent background in xml. I haven't really been able to get that much from this book in the way of examples. It's very light on examples.
(10 reviews)
