Competent, but far from extraordinary
The book is a competent explainiation of XSL-FO, which is an XML-based language for describing the appearance of text, usually for the purposes of printing it. If you thoroughly read everything, you will understand how areas, blocks, spacing, and the various other technicalities interrelate to one another.
However, the author does not seem to be very good at explaining these crucial concepts for an audience that has no or little familiarity with the subject matter. One can pick them up, but the author does not make it easy. In order to delineate the book into chapters, the author will make a mention of some crucial fact, but not go into detail on it until much later in the book. The material is complex enough, and the author's method of demarcation does not help the matter.
Also, as mentioned by others, this book does often use XSLT transform examples to "explain" XSL-FO concepts. While any significant use of XSL-FO will certainly use XSLT transforms to convert from some other XML format into the XSL-FO, it is not appropriate to offer examples of XSL-FO that are written as an XSLT transform. Having a chapter or two in techniques for writing XSLT transforms for XSL-FO would have been more appropriate than providing examples of XSL-FO concepts using XSLTs.
That being said, this book does cover some fairly difficult material. XSL-FO is very complex, particularly when it comes to positioning things. The information is all there, and it is all good. It is simply a matter of explaining that information in a way that one can read the book in a linear fashion and understand. To gain the full measures of XSL-FO, you will need to re-read the book, or at least the sections on position of elements.
Not a book for the faint of heart
An interesting book covering a powerful but niche technology. Not a book for the faint of heart, get it only if you want to investigate this very specific topic or plan to do things like XML > PDF transformation. The author digs immediately into the technical details, condensing a relevant amount of info in less than 200 pages; the results are good, focused and well structured, but it's not an entertaining read. This is definitely not a beginner book. A decent understanding of XML, XSL and XPath is required; some knowledge of printing would be helpful too
Apparently, too large a topic for one book.
Armed with only the most rudimentary understanding of XSLT, I found this book a little overwhelming. It's not a "cookbook", though the examples are good. There are a few places where it seems to dwell on minutia, but mostly it moves along at a jog to brisk run pace. I got a better understanding of the topic and and am prepared to do more research, but this could not be my only reference.
Show me XSL-FO, not XSLT
My main gripe with this book is the manner in which the author chose to present the material.Rather than focusing on "literal" XSL-FO, the author gives fragments of XSLT stylesheets that produce the XSL-FO. This means that the path to understanding the XSL-FO in the examples goes through XSLT.
While I understand the author's point in choosing this presentation (that no one will "really" be coding XSL-FO by hand, but will instead be writing XSLT stylesheets to generate XSL-FO from other XML input), I don't agree that it's the best way to explain the material.
I would have preferred to see actual, "complete" fragments of XSL-FO (both with and without larger context). I can draw my own conclusions about structuring the XSLT that I need. What I'm really keen to see is how the XSL-FO itself works, otherwise I've got no clue -what- to generate.
not for beginners
the author says he expects only some knowledge of xslt, but I think that some knowledge of printing and characteristics about texts, images, ... are also very useful if you want to understand this book. If you have this knowledge, this is a very good book for getting into the basics of xsl formatting objects.
(5 reviews)
