By Elliotte Rusty Harold
Review by: Alex
A while ago I reviewed the XML Programmers Bible, A book which gave an in-depth review on how to implement XML into web applications such as J2EE and Microsoft Office, the book was built for the advanced XML coder and therefore to get a good all around knowledge of XML I decided to order its companion... this very book. The first thing that should be noted is that unlike the programming bible, this book is aimed at those with little or no knowledge of the XML language, if you wish to use the XML Programming bible, therefore I recommend this book as your starting point. Like all bible books the XML bible contains a good all round base for your education in a language, it is an (almost) feature complete guide to the language covering both beginner to advanced level coding and like the other books in the series, this book is much more then just a reference manual. One of the advantages (and the reasons why I love the bible series) is that as well as being a manual, it contains almost in a course like fashion a complete step by step guide to mastering the language, and with 1,000 pages to its name, it does it in some great depth. XML is the future of the internet, with the rise in XHTML, AJAX, Open Document format, RSS and podcasting the XML framework is vastly becoming one of the most used languages on the internet and for those wishing to have an almost feature complete guide, reference and information sheet on the powerful server side language this book is one of the best ways you can go.
The book starts off by introducing the language (which requires a little existing knowledge of HTML), tells you about the many uses of XML in application and website development and kicks off by giving you a guide to writing your very first website application. Other chapter’s it covers includes DTD's, XSL, Xlinks, Xpointers and namespaces. Though this book covers a wide variety of technologies (more then most books actually) it has one major pitfall... its coverage of RSS was minimal (less then 5 pages to be more precise) and it actually had no reference to the mobile phone language WML which may put off some people from purchasing this title, therefore you may just wish to pick up a separate book on RSS and / or WML. Do not worry if you have no knowledge of HTML because there are chapters on using CSS and HTML with your applications and by using the code examples you can understand how XML is structured within your documents. Because of the way this book is laid out it is very informative however due to the sheer size of the book, those of a faint disposition may find the more highly technical articles just too much to swallow, this can be overcome by going through it, a chapter at a time and not trying to tackle everything at once (if you are new to the language). Users who have been using XML for a while may find the chapters which focus on specific areas they want to improve their knowledge on flow through well, even if you skipped a few chapters ahead to get to what you wanted to learn about. The other thing which should be noted about this book is that if you want more then just reference information, you may find sections which explain the reasons why the language is useful, the history of elements of the language and when and why you should use specific elements interesting. (An example of this is XSLT vs CSS.)
This book is suitable for the following types of people interested in website development:
- Website developers with an existing knowledge of XML wanting to expand what they know
- Beginners to website design who want to learn the rapidly evolving web 2.0 language of XML
- Users of AJAX, RSS or podcasting who want to expand their knowledge beyond "extensions".