Liam’s Technical bookshelf: XML

Neil describes XPath, XSLT and XSL/FO in enough detail to get you started. This is a comfortably thin book, and starts out with clear diagrams about nodes and trees, showing how XML documents are processed by XSLT.

This makes a good introductory companion to Mike Kay's XSLT Programmer’s Reference. Since it also introduces XSL/FO, it could help you get started there too, along with Dave Pawson’s XSL-FO.

Highly recommended.

Zarella is on the W3C XSL Working Group (her co-author, John Gardner, might be there too, but I don’t know him).

This is a very gentle introduction to XSLT. As a programmer I found it a bit too gentle, I’m afraid.

Ben Hammersley does a good job of navigating between the cliffs of incompatibility and the whirlpools of politics, and sticks to the technical issues. Any book on RSS has to face up to the nightmare of incompatible versions, and the presentation here is clear and helpful.

If I have a criticism of this book it is that it doesn't say enough about the culture of RSS: how often do you update your feed? How many items? Is 16 truly and always the only possible number? So you will need to explore a little to find out how to use RSS to good effect, and this book does give you pointers to get started.

All in all a refreshingly useful volume.

This turns out to be a pretty useful summary. If you buy this, make sure you get the second edition for the W3C XML Schema information. Even if you’re not using W3C XML Schemas now, you probably will soon, with XSLT 2 and XML Query both using it, and more and more applicaiton support.

This is the best reference on XSLT that I have seen. It’s not the best introduction, though. For that you want Niel Bradley’s XSL Companion or the book by John Robert Gardner and Zarella Rendon, XSLT & XPATH.

Mike Kay is very active on the XSL WG, and this really is a spendid book. If you are doing a lot of work with XSLT, you want this one.

(unfortunately, Moonkitty liked my copy and put huge holes in the cover on the day I bought the second edition, but I forgave her)

If you are an occasional XSLT programmer, and you are familiar with recursion and functional programming, you may find the O’Reilly book by Doug Tidwell more to your taste.

I come back to this book over and over again. Let’s hope that Wrox survives as a publisher, as it would be a great shame to lose this title.

I wish I'd had this book when I started using XSLT. Examples range from implementing simple replacements for regular expressions in XSLT to gnerating SVG on the fly in a web browser; there's too much stuff to cover in a short review.

This book belongs on your shelf next to Mike Kay's reference, if yuo can still buy it with the demise of Wrox Press.

I wish O’Reilly would focus a little more on pretty-printing XML and source code in general. Just putting attribute names in bold when they are being discussed in the text, would help.

This book, together with Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, should be given to everyone statring out to do Web design. Eric Meyer gives a series of carefully worked before/after examples showing how style sheets can save bandwidth and make Web sites look smarter.

You should also consider reading some books on typography, graphic design and layout, becuse a basic understanding of typographical principles such as ratios, alignment, contrast and emphasis are not covered in this book. But then, a book that covered everything would be huge!

This is the most useful book I have seen on CSS so far.

Despite the sub-title, you should have either a background in typography or a good design reference on hand before tackling this book. Probably Robin Cover’s Non-Designer's Design Book would be enough to get yougoing, although you should be aware that book design is a serious and skilled discipline.

You will also need an XSL/FO implementation. Luckily, most or all of the examples work in the open source Apache FOP program.

There aren’t a lot of books on XSL/FO, and since it’s a really difficult specification to approach, this book should carve out a good niche for itself.

Since I wrote this book, I won’t try and tell you to buy it. Some people have told me they found it useful. I tried to introduce philosophical concepts and strategies, so although there are code examples, there is no API reference or anything here.

If you are writing XML software, or need to have a deep understanding of the XML specification, including a reference, you may find this book helpful. It refers to the First Edition of XML, and does not cover namespaces.

Clearer presentation than Mike Kay's book, and the examples are well-chosen, but you still want Mike Kay's book for a reference.

I find the cross-references irritating. For example, on page 66, See the section, Boolean Operators, for more information sends me to the index; why can't they give the page number?

I am one of the authors of this book, so take this with a pinch of salt!

There’s a good introduction to XML, XSLT, and many associated specifications. There are chapters on DocBook, RDF, Dublin Core, SVG, XSLFO, SOAP, WDDX, and a whole lot more.

One of my regrets is that I did not do a good job with W3C XML Schema: I simply couldn’t see how to write about it in two twenty-page chapters. I did give an overview, though.

You might be able to find this book remaindered. If yuo get it by mail order watch that it is fairly heavy, so postage might be high!

A strength of this book is that it does have very broad coverage of a lot of different parts of XML and the XML family.

This is a lot of book. You won’t be carrying it around in your pocket. On the other hand, Chuck was one of my co-authors with Mastering XML, and I can say that he’s very thorough and careful. There are some great diagrams. Unlike most XSLT writers, Chuck does show some XML documents as trees, which really seems to help people understand XPath and XSLT more quickly.

Examples include generating HTML, XML, text, making tables and forms, RTF, CSV files (comma-separated values, often used for spreadsheets and database work), PDF with XSL-FO, and has over 40 pages of references and links to resources at the back.

One minor criticism: DOM examples use Visual Basic, where maybe C#, Java or JavaScript might have been more platform-neutral. But they are a very small part of the book.

If your Web site maintainer doesn't have this book, go out and buy a copy. Get them a copy for home, and one for work, and one for the bathroom.

This is not a reference like Ian Grahan’s book, so you will probably want both. But it looks great for explaining why standards are important on the Web, gives a detailed introduction to Accessibility, CSS, embedding Flash, and has a good makeover chapter. There are workarounds for the broken IE box model implementation, caveats about CSS rule ordering, and a lot of helpful arguments you can use to convince other people of why they need to make valid Web pages that work in every browser.

Get down on your knees, slave! Yes, naked! Read this book, and don't get dressed until you finish it!