Customer Reviews

XML in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This books starts out with a quick explanation and walkthrough or XML 1.0 specification that is pretty good. It is lacking a XML Schema (XSD) section as well covers very briefly the XSLT (XML Stylesheets) anyone wishing to anything with sytlesheets after reading this book will be disappointed. XPath coverage is pretty good as well as SAX, & DTD. XLink, XPointer, are talking about but nothing in depth. All example code is in JAVA. Anyone wanting specialized knowledge of ASP.NET / .NET / MS SQL usage of XML should look elsewhere (this is somewhat understandable due to the publish date.)

This is the only XML book I have - I skimmed through several and this one was far and away the best. You will have to know what you are trying to do and sort of figure out which parts of the book to pay attention to as there is so much there. I spent some time with DTDs only to realize they were unnecessary for what I was doing. But the book allowed me to build an application from scratch.

I found this book useful for learning XML. Because XML offers a large variety of uses, this book is not well suited for beginners. pvr-consulting

The authors managed to compress an amazing amount of information in a very small amount of space, without affecting readability. Including coverage of XML, DTD, Namespaces, XSL, Xpath, Xlinks, DOM and much more, including Schemas (missing from previous edition). As a bonus we get reference for XML, Schemas, Xpath, XSLT, DOM and SAX. Much more than good value for money, it's a real bargain. Just not recommended to absolute newbies

I have read part of the book and tried to use it as a reference, but always confused with the bad organization, not to mention some typo errors.
personally, I don't recommend it.

The first 3 chapters are explained so wage that you really do not get any introduction to XML. No direct benifits of XML are explained. You feel to stop reading this book.

I forcibly continued to the next chapters....

DTD chapter is OK but not practical.

Namespaces chapter is so badly explained that I just can not explain in words. One should read that chapter and decide themselves of how to express that bad explanation. I am not finding words to explain.

THE IMPORTANT POINT IS "THEY USE UNKNOWN WORDS SUCH AS XSLT, XLink, XPath BEFORE EXPLAINING WHAT THEY ARE". In the very first chapter they explained all these in 2 lines without any meaning. I really did not understand what they are trying to explain. They use XLink, XPath etc in previous chapters and explain what they are in the next chapters. So, really you dont understand what they are using in previous chapters.

Simply, very badly written. It is complete waste of money purchasing this book. Moreover, one of the authors might have written some classical suspense novels. His explanation of subject was always comparing with something imaginatory and put you in lot of trouble. Especially first few chapters.

This book continues the Nutshell tradition of putting a lot of information into a well-written, well organized format. The first 330 pages give a useful summary of each of the core XML standards along with short but illustrative examples. The writer's did an excellent job of covering the technical details of each technology and explaining where that technology could be applied. The final 220 pages are a good reference of the different tags and attributes of each standard. The reference also includes one of the best breakdowns of Unicode character sets I have found in a printed book.

I can't stress to you enough that this is the XML book of all XML books. I am NOT an expert in XML, but with this book, I can fumble my way through an XML application. This book will NOT teach you everything there is to know about XML. This book IS a wonderful reference to thumb through for each XML question that arises. If I had to buy one XML book to do my job, XML in a Nutshell would be the one. I own many books in the "Nutshell" series and absolutely LOVE and use them all. So if you've got a project in XML to complete, go get this book and watch how much time it saves you.

This is a great book. Short and to the point. It covers a large amount of subject matter without needing thousands of pages to do it. The reference section is very nice to have handy. All in all another great Nutshell book.

The Nutshell series of books from O'Reilly have a special section of my desk established for them; no other set of books condenses so much information for reference. This book is no exception to this fact.

Before I continue, please avoid buying an O'Reilly Nutshell book expecting it to teach you about the topic it is intended for. As far as I've worked with them, these books are not intended as a do-all be-all that other references want to be. The information introducing you to XML is sparse, so if you don't know anything about XML, get another book. I recommend XML: A Primer by Simon St. Laurent; it is an excellent learning tool, and though it doesn't go into all the detail the XML standard can go into (no book I've found can do such), it provides the user with understanding of XML.

XML in a Nutshell is what I use when I've forgotten how to use a certain aspect of XML detail. As a reference and a second book on XML, nothing comes close.