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XML for Real Programmers, by Reaz Hoque, is indeed a book for real programmers. But while it's a competent tour-de-force of XML practice, the book lacks many things beginners might wish were there. Additional minor flaws add to the impression of a "programmer's book," but on the whole, if you are indeed that "real programmer" at whom the book is targeted, you can read with confidence in order to confirm your general grasp of the usage and deployment of XML in real-world applications.
The chapters of the book are:
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 revolve around a nice sample application -- a shopping-basket-style web site -- which employs the techniques propounded by the book.
The CD-ROM content is well thought out. The code listings are accompanied by a selection of XML parsers tools. They've made sure that you will be able to reproduce the build environment, no minor consideration when exploring XML, so they've included LotusXSL and an evaluation copy of Visual Age Java 3.0. This book was released in the spring of 2000, so it's no surprise that the XML community's choice of parsers might be different today. Apache is much more a presence, so much so that IBM has now integrated with the Apache code, whereas Aelfred is fading, as are certain other parsers that seemed important enough to mention a year ago. JAXP is not found on the disk nor mentioned in the text. ANT should also be mentioned in any second edition of this book.
The introduction states that "This book is an advanced book; it does not present extensive details on the XML specification, but it covers how to use this technology in the real world."
That's very much the case in the first chapter as it rushes through the brisk review of basics of XML on the way to reaching the actual topics of discussion. It's a shame that the first chapter wasn't proofed better because it's marred by typographical errors, the most annoying kind in a computer language book. There's a world of difference between
<
and
<,
or between
<!--
and
<!-
-
but the editor missed these and others, including some English-language syntax errors that occasionally garble the text. Part of the confusion may have stemmed from group authorship; in the last pages of the book we discover this was a collaborative effort, with contributions from Vishal Anand, Mike Alexander, and Bruce Weber. While the technical inclinations of the team are reliable and well centered, the uneven quality of the writing itself is one more snippet of anecdotal evidence that a renewed emphasis on the classics and on the humanities for technical degree candidates might not be misplaced.
As noted above, XML for Real Programmers was published in early 2000. No, Morgan Kaufman (the publisher) did not slack off sending over the review copy; this book has been on my desk for over a year and I have been reading it and referring to it from time to time. I was engaged, and still am engaged, in managing a development team deploying a rather large Java/XML project for the wireless handheld Internet, and went around and around in my mind about how to assess XML for Real Programmers, which I initially found difficult to read. By now, this book has gotten a pretty thorough review, and I've concluded that it's a worthwhile example presentation of what XML is going to look like to you the first time you deploy it.
XML has been changing rapidly. As a language with almost no semantic content of its own, XML morphs into whatever it is surrounded by. The more it's used, the more sophisticated grow the ideas and tools. The XSL transform employed to build the applications presented here is starting to yield in the field to a return to hand-coded approaches as the limitations of XSL become more apparent (processing load, difficulty adapting to truly dynamic transforms). Yet you will never understand why this is happening, or how any other of the mysterious currents are flowing through the river of XML praxis, until you work your own way up through the first levels of XML deployment. Working your way through XML for Real Programmers is a pretty good way to do just that.
-- Jack Woehr (http://www.softwoehr.com)
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale:
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