XML Family of Specifications: A Practical Guide [Paperback]

Pin the chart above your computer!

This may sound trivial to some. But when you are digging your way through a detailed set of examples in the book, it really helps to have a schematic overview to place things in perspective. All the more so if you happen to be new to many of the topics. Even experienced users can benefit.

The book has a CD with full listings of the examples. A great time saver. Also, since the author did not provide problem sets, you can easily make up your own, based on the CD. For example, suppose you are looking at Chapter 8, "Parsing with the DOM". Take an example document and its DTD from the CD. Change the DTD to add more elements and attributes. Make some of these mandatory. Run the parser on the document and the DTD. You should get errors, as expected, because the document is missing some new required items. Understand the error messages. Then correct the document by adding instances of those items. Rerun the parser. Any errors? If not, then try adding more to the DTD and document. This will really help you learn. You can quickly build up documents of some nontrivial complexity.

Of course, you can, and should, do analogous things with the other chapters.

In terms of the reader's background (I'm talking to you): You can come from either a formal programming environment, or from a publishing/designer background. In both cases, you should already be well familiar with HTML. This is not a formal prerequisite, but a lot of things in the book really do come easier if you know HTML. The programming examples in the book are usually in java, but the author emphasises that XML is not a procedural programming language like java. Rather, it is a declarative language, where you make templates. In this sense, XML is closer to HTML than to java or C.

This book is worth your attention.

Appendices at the back of the book are especially valuable because they summarize much of the information in the body of the book. For example, Appendix A depicts the family of specifications in a format that clearly shows the relationships among them. In addition, the web site that supports the book provides a lot of supplementary material, including over 900 links to related resources and an image map of the family of specifications that is one of the most visually appealing and informative resources one can have at their disposal. Note that the web site is not up-to-date - some information that was cited as coming in April and May were still not online as of late June.

This is not a book for learning XML as much as it's a reference. The main value over W3C material that is available over the web is the clear writing and many examples. It reads much better than dry specs and is complete in its coverage.

It also touches on a few non-W3C XML specifications (SAX, RELAX NG, JDOM) which are important to the overall understanding of XML technologies. This book provides an informed overview of the use of these technologies.

I recommend this book as a must for any XML library.