Customer Reviews

Professional XML

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book is awful. I can't believe my college used it as a text. this book stuffers the same problems as every other Wrox Press book. It sucks. It's over written because obviously a book with more pages is informative, it's rushed to press, as you can tell by having to have 13 or so authors pound it out practically over night. The book doesn't cover anything well it's written poorly, so poorly eventually I just started skipping around and defacing the book in class. It's amazing I've only owned 2 or 3 other books this bad and honestly their all Wrox Press that Red Cover is a big stop sign. AVOID THEM ALL THEIR ALL CRAP

This is a very boring book. Chapters look like well organized, but content inside is mass and hard to follow. Don't buy this book.

THIS IS MOST BORING BOOK I EVER READ

It is easy to tell that this book was written by 12 different authors. The quality and writing style of each chapter varies widely. I thought the chapters on XPath, XSLT, DOM, SAX2, and SOAP were well written, but I was disappointed by some of the others.

The chapter on XML Schemas was the worst, in my opinion. This is a very important subject, but it is given the same amount of space as much less important topics. As a result, the author of this chapter tries to cover too much in too little space and ends up being quite confusing. Examples are thrown out followed by only partial explanations, and the author forgets to do some basic things like showing a sample XML document to match the sample XML Schemas in the examples. If you need to understand XML Schemas, skip this chapter and go directly to "Professional XML Schemas," which is very well written book on the subject.

This book is also too large and attempts to cover too many obscure topics. For example, it wastes a chapter on "XML Schema Alternatives" when it is clear that XML Schema is the approach that will be used by almost everyone going forward.

Finally, my standard complaint about all WROX books is that the font they use is too small! I feel like I'm reading a telephone book. Give the readers a break by taking out some of the less important chapters and increasing the font size.

Please allow me to speak out in a straight way about the book since I think it is necessary to do it.

I chose this book for my XML course of computer science major. During the course of my teaching, I have kept finding many vague and deficient concepts, few practical guides in each chapter, errors in codes, which are not fully tested, and not well-organized conceptual structures in the book.

I am sorry to say that I don't think the book should be seen as professional book because it does NOT go deep enough in any chapter that a professional needs. But the book provides many reference links, and it gives you a broad talk about XML and some related applications.

For experienced XML developers, the book may be useful as a reference. However, I cannot recommend it as a tutorial. The book goes into far too much arcane detail about subjects such as character sets (UNICODE, etc...), entity and attribute naming conventions, and so forth; while giving examples somewhat short shrift. It does not develop topics from the simple to the complex - rather, it examines each topic in mind-boggling detail, with the result that one has not digested the basics of a topic before being overwhelmed with the specifics.

Perhaps as I gain experience with XML this book will become more useful, but for now I'll be looking for a more basic reference.

Sean

This is a good book for IBM XML 141 certification. I passed my certification largely due to this book. The book covers a lot of ground and is an absolute must for the certification.
Also it covers not only XML but also a lot of other related technologies like XPath, XQuery,XSLT, XLink, XPointer, Databases and XML, SOAP, UDDI and WSDL etc.
Overall I think it is worth every penny and is a book I want in my XML book shelf. However one minor drawback of the book is the large number of authors.

please take the ugly faces off the books. this is not tabloid

I found this book very boring and tedious reading. The style of the book seems to vary as much as the number of authors. The concepts don't smoothly flow together. The book is a hodgepodge of technical information presented in patches by a huge bunch of authors. Obviously this book was an attempt to bring to market a book on XML as quickly as possible. The book doesn't provide enough examples or applications although it does present many examples on syntax. This may be a good reference book, but to really learn how to use XML I'm searching for another book.

The book covers too many topics and just few are developed in deep while others are superficially introduced because not yet standardized at the time of print. The book claims it covers the following topics: XML, XSLT, DOM, DTD, SOAP, XLink, XPointer, XPath, WAP, WML...and more; but just XML, Schemas, DTDs and SOAP could almost fit the book's size.

Chapters don't follow a very logic thread and it doesn't deal enough with very relevant subjects. Wrox probably planned to make this book the XML bible but I think they are far from the target.