1 comments about Building Web Applications with ADO.NET and XML Web Services (Gearhead Press--In the Trenches).

1. This book has a great, easy-to-read style and the case study actually shows how to use these technologies in real life. It clearly explains how to use ADO.NET and XML to build data-intensive applications. The writers clearly know what they are talking about and have been in the trenches.

4 comments about Sax2.

1. David Brownell's new book is a solid piece of work, containing many useful insights that can only come from someone who works with SAX day in and day out. It has already answered many of the questions I have had about SAX that I have not been able to find elsewhere, at least not readily.

   I really like the way the book progresses naturally from the basics of the API to more advanced concepts. And there are plenty of examples and that is a key, I think, to the success of a technical book -- that it can actually demonstrate the concepts it teaches in a way that can be quickly grasped and even implemented. The book is brief, concise, and very up to date as well.

   I think just about any SAX programmer will learn something new and worthwhile from this book. While I found a few typos in the book, they are easy to forgive in light of the overall value of the book.




2. have finished 3 chapters. Nothing great as yet as far as content is concerned.
   I picked this book because it is written by someone who manages SAX API. But unfortunately the writing is NOT clear. Normally oreilly books are an easy read. Am finding this to be confusing :-(



3. I bought this one for my IBM XML Certification Exam.

   But after reading 4 chapters I must say that the book is poorly written. This book confirms to me that insight is one thing and ability to express the ideas is another.

   The book is divided into 6 chapters. There are some good programs that are small and crispy. But the explanations are awkward. There are some mistakes/typos as well.




4. Most books introduce the SAX with one or two chapters, providung the basic concept and use of SAX. However if you want to learn more detail of SAX and bring SAX into play well, this book will help you reach these.

   I think this book is not suiatable for SAX begginers. If you want to begging SAX, you may reading the SAX chapter in the general books of XML before reading this book. And I recommend the book "Begging XML" (David Hunter, Wrox).

   Though a little hard to reading, this book provide many useful and valuable example code. And it really discuss every topic deeply and in detail, so readers should take time to understand the core meaning of the author.

1 comments about Visualizing the Semantic Web.

1. If you are analysing various XML-encoded data, and am overwhelmed with the sheer mass of it all, you have probably wondered about displaying it. The problem is that there are an infinite number of ways to display data.
   
   This book can only describe a small, finite number of display ideas. But it may well be worth your while to at least quickly thumb through the chapters. Various authors offer different takes on their data sets. The book also has some nice colour plates showing results.
   
   In the book's title, you can ignore Semantic Web if you so choose. The key thing is supposedly that you have XML data. But it turns out that even this is not a necessary restriction. One way to read this book is to look for different data visualisation ideas. If you find one that is promising, you then have to reimplement it for your data structures.

5 comments about XML: Extensible Markup Language.

1. No software support, the contents are not comply with the technology. I couldn't get anything out of it. I found myself reading sample chapters from here and there.



2. ...if you are interested in a concise overview of the W3C open-standard XML technology, as opposed to a getting yet another Microsoft sales pitch (a la Wrox).

   Every book on every Internet technology gets outdated fast. The book is outdated. That being said, I found the book clear, fast, and easy to understand.

   The author went to extensive pains to point out how quickly things were shifting in XML. His examples were well thought out, logical, and contained few (if any) obvious errata. Furthermore, he took the trouble to point out the cases where the commercial toolage failed to correctly implement the W3C standard. Readers who can deal with these caveats will find it a good way to come up to speed in a vendor-neutral manner.

   I was aware that the book was obsolete when I bought it. But I reviewed the alternatives carefully before I bought and decided that it was the best of the lot. I am happy with my purchase now that it's about 2/3 read. (The O'Reilly version isn't due out until December, or I would have been tempted to buy that instead. I may still.)

   I hope that Mr. Harold will update the examples as needed, that he will continue to stick exclusively to the W3C standard, that he will demonstrate using all the available tools (including the emerging open-source tools), and will point out cases where the commercial and open-source tools fail to comply with the W3C standard.




3. This book has been updated by Elliotte Harold and for some unfortunate reason is now called The XML Bible. (unfortunate for me, I just got this book to discover that it's completely revised. I'm out $32.)



4. You mean like how DOS was supposed to be replaced by better operating systems by 1982? Really -- we're going to be stuck with plain 'ol HTML for decades.



5. So you've learned HTML and DHTML and CSS and who needs another bunch of angle brackets?

   Oh, well. XML is perfectly symetric (no more unbalanced "BR"s). Isn't that nice?

   But there's no getting around it. You've gotta learn XML because everybody really is moving toward its adoption. This book will do a good job of getting you started. It took me all the way from a standing start to creating my own Windows Channel (CDF) which is quite a lot.

   The book "XML Applications" will take you to the next step and these things become dated quickly. But if you start here, you will be happy about it.

1 comments about XML for Bioinformatics.

1. This is a nice brief introductory overview of xml in general and its implementations in biological research. The thing I liked about it was it was not too intensive on any topic, and it provided a lot of useful resources both online and literature-wise for me to look up for more information.
   
   It definitely sparked my interest in certain areas of xml and how I may apply it towards my research. One of the things that I really liked was that the author always spelled out all the mentioned acronyms (thank you, finally someone exists out there that does this!). In addition, I also appreciated that the author did not get too bogged down in anyone topic resulting in a bible-like introductory work - thank you again for that. As a result of this I was literally able to read it in few days and determine the usefulness of this technology called `xml`; and without having to read 1k pages to determine this. In this case 'Less is sometimes definitely more'.
   
   My favorite chapter was the one covering Web Services and now understand the basic concepts behind XML-RPC, REST, and SOAP.
   The only reason I give it 4 stars is a.)its pricey for a grad student and b.)I use Perl, and he has a two or so chapters using Java to parse xml. So those chapters were not useful to me. But hey you can't please everyone :)
   
   Overall, it helped me recognize just what xml is, how it may be used, who uses it (esp. in biology) - and how they use it, and a list of references for more info. Definitely a good little book to check out for basic conceptual understanding. I want to say its almost a survey, but its actually a little more than that.

5 comments about Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days (2nd Edition).

1. Admittedly, XML is not a mature technology, and a thorough treatment (or even introduction) to the changing landscape of XML is a challenge. But this book fell far too short of its goal.

   Too many inconsistencies to ignore. Many "refer to" captions where the code or screenshot did not match the comment. Some supporting information was only depicted in these missing items, so of course, the reader was left with no context for the caption.

   Too many code samples that did not work. Speaking of code samples, this book had the smallest amount of samples I've seen in any of the "21 Days" books I have read (6). The code samples included did not begin to describe the text of the book. For example, in the DOM chapter, the author listed roughly 20 properites and 20 methods--yet only two properties, and one method were shown via code samples. Thoroughly disappointing. Further, the author chose to describe only Microsoft's implementation of the DOM! Odd, yes, even odder when you read below that in a later chapter, the author eschews the parser he already told you to download so he can explain the SAX in Java.

   Let me intersperse a semi-positive comment in the sea of negative ones. The author is clearly a good writer--sentences are well-constructed, and the author is good with words. Unfortunately, he is not as good at instructing.

   Another problem--the book was published in August 2001, but is already out of date. How can this be? Obviosuly, many chapters were written long ago, and were not rewritten to address any new specifications or emerging standards. While DTD's and XDR are still used, I feel that XSD should have been covered in much more detail--after all, it's the W3C's recommendation, so it should be emphasized.

   Another general annoyance: I got sick of seeing text like this: "we haven't covered these features, but. . . " when commenting on the sparse sample code provided.

   Chapter on SAX: useless to me. Why? I don't know Java. Instead of using the MSXML parser used throughout the rest of the book, the author chose to use Sun's Java parser for the SAX chapter. I have no clue why. Plenty of code samples in this chapter--kudos! In fact 65% of the chapter was samples--too bad I don't know Java.

   Scope was also a problem. For example, namespaces is an easy concept to understand, but the author spent 15 pages explaining them. XSD, a little more difficult to understand, but didn't receive much more attention.

   I could go on, but I will spare you. Postive side: author is clearly a good writer, and some chapters were top notch. But the inconsistencies were disturbing--detail, skim, detail, skim. In the author's defense, this is an evolving topic, and a thorough, current treatment is next to impossible. I suspect that only Wrox's multiple author approach could do XML justice at this stage of the game.




2. I was looking for a book that would introduce XML and show me some real code examples of how to use it. I got that and more from this book. It is really well written - the author is more than a techies, he knows how to write and present complex concepts in understandable language.

   There is a lot of material in this book. As the author points out, this is a 21-day study of XML, you can't cover every single aspect of every one of the many technologies that are part of the XML family of tools, but somehow this book manages to cover the most useful of waht is available.

   There is something for everyone in this book. If you like to write Java, there are examples in Java, there are also examples in JavaScript, VBScript, VB, various databases and three or four different browsers. The parsers used include Saxon, Xalan, XT, MSXML, Apache, and all sorts of others. Best of all, as the author points out, if you can appreciate the relatively simple underlying constructs, it really doesn't matter what language you choose to write in. This is excellent since it helps to prove that XML is platform agnostic and can be programmed in almost any language and used in almost any toolset.

   We have used some of the code out examples right out of the book to create a data-centric XML application for transaction exchange. The best part of this is that our business partners have different platforms and different programming environments and that doesn't matter at all, since we are all speaking XML when it comes to exchanging data. I learned how to do this by reading this book and working along with the examples provided.

   My only regret with regard to this book is that it didn't include more than 21 days worth of material - I would have liked 42 days! This was such a good read, I found myself wanting more at the end of it.

   I really got my money's-worth and more from this book, recommend it highly and can't wait to read whatever this author writes next. If you are looking for a very well-written survey of fundamental XML concepts, that covers a wide variety of the basic technologies, and touches various tools and platforms - try this book.




3. Wonderful book if you have enough time to type all codes. No CD comes with this book, no source codes available.



4. I usually don't say anything unless I have something nice to say, but I feel the positive reviews for this book are highly overrated. I'm quite stunned by how much copy the author of this book managed to churn out on what otherwise could have been a concise and to-the-point tutorial. Do I really need to read through 7 paragraphs on the decision-making process of the W3C before I can learn about XML schemas...? While some may find that kind of information thorough, I find it distracting. The reviewers who feel this book was well-written obviously don't think good writing should be compelling. The writing style, while organized and grammatically correct, is very very dry and repetitious. The tone reminds me of the more boring professors I had in college. There is no humor or person-to-person feel you get with writers like Laura Lemay. Even given the author's verbosity, the book (almost flagrantly) glosses over what I felt should have been the most important lesson: the XSD schema language, which most people agree to be the standard syntax for XML. If you want an efficient introduction to XML, you are better off running through the online tutorials offered on the w3schools website.



5. I was looking for a book that would introduce the overall concepts of the many XML technologies and give me a chance to play with them on my own. Although this book is not accompanied by a CD, I would prefer to enter the code myself and learn from making a mistake here and there. The concepts are very clearly described in concise and meaningful language in this book with a wealth of examples.
   
   I give this book my highest recommendation. There is now a third edition out, but this one contains meaningful and approachable examples and should not be overlooked.
   
   P.S. I got my copy of this book while attending a course being offered by the author. Aside from being well-written, Devan Shepherd is an excellent instructor. If you have the chance to take one of his courses, or attend one of his talks, don't miss the opportunity. He is entertaining and highly knowledgable.

5 comments about Professional Java E-Commerce.

1. The Audience for this Book

   Java E-Commerce is aimed at people who already know Java and need to evaluate the technologies available. I first I wondered what the target audience would be, if you are a programmer you might not get to choose the technologies and if you are a manager you might not have the time or inclination to learn about these technologies in such depth. I now appreciate that they are appropriate for just about anyone except a beginner, most programmers need to know what technologies are available and managers need to know what the programmers are talking about.

   How the book is organised

   The book is divided into five sections starting with The E-commerce Landscape. This didn't tell me much I didn't already know, evolution of internet... exciting, define e-commerce....arpanet, web browsers etc etc. All scene setting stuff, but you can't have a fairy story without "once upon a time". Things get a little more interesting with Section 2, "Architecting Java Based e-commerce systems".

   Some parts of the web world assume that "everyone uses Microsoft Internet Explorer". The authors of this book recognize that in the future your audience might well be WebTV, a mobile phone or PDA. Although there is plenty of coverage of specific Java technologies such as EJB and Servlets the book recognises that most developments will have to fit in with legacy systems and that the heart of the task is to give the potential purchaser a usable and easy browsing experiences.

   Much of the material covers topics I already knew about superficially. Some crucial aspects covered are EJB, XML and JMS. I was fairly stunned to note a mention of the Log4J technology from the Apache group. If you haven't come across Log4J, go to the Apache org web site and download it. I challenge anyone not to find a use for it in any non trivial application. Even allowing for the time it takes to put a book together this illustrates that the authors are right at the front of developing technologies, absorb what these people say, they know what they are talking about.

   Plenty of XML Coverage

   The topic of XML runs though large parts of the book. Chapter 16 gives an interesting overview of the emerging standards in XML dtd's. There are a raft of competing standards and the dust is yet to clear on which ones will be generally adopted. Chapter 13 has an in-depth discussion of an Intelligent Assistant, ie a natural language parser system to allow customers to interact with a virtual shop assistant. I thought this was interesting in an academic way but I suspect that the number of people who will actually adopt this technology would be very small indeed. The

   Bits I enjoyed most

   The part I enjoyed most was a part I thought I might not even get around to reading which was Chapter 23, "In the MarketPlace, Corporate Purchasing". This is written in a laconic style by people who obviously have plenty of real world experience. Mixed in with headings like " Characteristics of Corporate Purchasing Systems are titles like "The headaches of having more than one partner." At the end of this chapter are 4 case studies that made me smile for all the right reasons. I did my post graduate education in Software after I had a decade of experience in the industry. It used to annoy me that the lecturers insisted on describing an ideal world that I knew did not exist. I get annoyed by technical books that insist that by following their golden recipes everything will go perfectly. The 4 case studies illustrate that things rarely go to plan, frequently do not go as expected and sometimes have to use horrible solutions but can still solve the problems. If you are browsing your local book shop, pick up this book and jump to the end of chapter 23.

   I try to read everything I can about emerging net and Java technologies but I learnt a whole slew of new things reading Java E-Commerce. Notably the nature of B2B technologies. I had rather foolishly assumed it was just more web applications where the person using the browser at one end was in a business and connecting to a server at another business. It actually refers to using web technologies to replace the automated EDI technologies that large corporations have been using for years. I found the topic of XSLT transformations fascinating in that it explains how to get around the incompatibilities between different forms of XML used by different companies. If two companies use different DTDs to structure their XML XSLT can be used to convert between the formats. Until I read that section I had thought of XSLT as a way of transforming XML into nicely formatted HTML.

   I found the chapter on M-commerce (transactions via mobile devices) to be interesting as a primer on what can be done via mobile devices, but I suspect you could fit everyone who has ever placed an order via a mobile phone, in my living room and still have space for unexpected visitors.
   The book gives a high level coverage of a wide range of related Java technologies by people who appear to have actually worked with them on real world projects. The authors seem to have actually used the technologies in the real world rather than just read the documents and played with a few toy applications. It gives you enough to evaluate how and where you would use each of the technologies and examples of how people have used it in real projects.

   Should you buy it?

   If you want to be aware of what technologies are available and find out how they can be applied then this is an excellent buy. If you want to start to learn and implement any of the topics mentioned from scratch, you would be better off buying a book that caters specifically for that topic.
   ...




2. I can't believe the rating some people give this book. This book touches a lot of areas with little depth. The book contains a lot of filling with no practical usable things.

   The information on practical Java E-commerce is very limited, and if you need usable information on JSP, Application Servers, ... I suggest you buy books about the specific areas you need information on. Even if this book was intended to be a high level overview on E-commerce it would miss its mark.




3. There are a few good sections in this book (mainly the chapters that deal with WebLogic and the appendices of primers and reference material that comprise Section 6). However, considering that this book weighs in at over 1000 pages, its mainly fluff or glib (but not helpful), with too much material that states the obvious.

   Much of the fluff is found in Section 1 (The E-Commerce Landscape), and Section 2 (Architecting Java-Based E-Commerce Systems) was, in my opinion, a glossed over, high-level overview that was used as filler.

   Sections 3 (B2C E-Commerce Solutions) and 4 (B2B E-Commerce Solutions) have a few interesting chapters in each. My main complaint here is that Section 3 is a mix of solutions and techniques, while Section 4 is purely solution-focused. Section 5 (M-Commerce) is too light to be useful, and most of the material is already woefully out of date.

   My recommendation is to pass this book up and, instead, seek out single-topic books that address the subjects in which you're interested.




4. Of all the technical books I've read this one qualifies as the worst. It's out of date, but even when it was new it would justify my opinion.

   It attempts to cover too wide an area of subjects, and manages to either state the obvious (as in the first chapters that make a sophmoric attempt to define e-commenrce), to display questionable knowledge on the part of contributing authors, as in the section that lamely attempts to discuss architecture. The section on architecture should have been written by someone who could write and who understood architecture. Unfortunately I got the impression that the authors had neither qualifications.

   The case studies were interesting, but were not sufficiently insightful to warrant buying this book that those alone.

   There are positives to this book though. It weighs nearly 6 pounds, making it suitable as a doorstop. Having photos of all of the authors who contributed on the front cover is helpful if you conduct interviews since it helps in the screen process in case one of them shows up for an interview or tries to come in as a consultant.

   My advice is to avoid this book. There are much better ones that cover the subjects in it.




5. This is the only book that covers such a wide range of issues relating to the application of Java to e-commerce. Although there are subjects that experienced users would certainly prefered to see treated in more depth this is an invaluable resource to those that need to get the big picture to a level that is practical and useful for understanding application and designing solutions. Well done.

No comments about XSLT Developer's Guide.

3 comments about Java P2P Unleashed: With JXTA, Web Services, XML, Jini, JavaSpaces, and J2EE (Unleashed).

1. this book has too much redundant info and lacks coherence. try the jxta in a nutshell instead; to the point, simple and clear.



2. This book's title is a bit misleading, as it covers a lot more than P2P. In addition to JXTA, it also has chapters on Jini, and several chapters on Web services. Some of the chapters are better than others; the chapters on JXTA are especially informative. Because the book has many authors, some of the information is repeated, but that does not detract from the book's overall high quality.



3. Peer-to-peer (P2P) has progressed from a curiosity to a serious opportunity for businesses to move beyond the costs and limitations of traditional client-server based computing. With a choice of several new, maturing technologies, Java developers need a single source to explain the benefits of each technology and help them see how to fit the P2P "pieces" together - both in building new systems and integrating with existing ones. Java P2P Unleashed: With JXTA, Web Services, XML, Jini, JavaSpaces, and J2EE starts with a discussion of the P2P architecture, referencing similarities with existing, familiar systems while previewing several types of P2P applications. Java P2P Unleashed explains how to plan ahead for security, routing, performance and other issues when developing a P2P application. Each Java P2P technology is approached from a P2P perspective, focusing on implementation concerns Java developers will face while using them. The last section includes several large-scale examples of different P2P applications - managing content, building communities, integrating services, routing messages, and using intelligent agents to gather information. The final chapter looks ahead to future developments in Java P2P technologies, including the use of J2ME. Java P2P Unleashed is confidently recommended for Intermediate to Advanced level users. 752 pages.

5 comments about Beginning Visual Basic .NET Databases.

1. This is a great book, but it is definitely helpful if you already have some VB.NET knowledge as suggested by the publisher prior to starting this book. I did not, and so some of the examples were hard for me to follow (no fault of the authors). I like the hands-on examples in this book. They are basic but relevant to the real-world. I got a lot out of this book despite my inexperience with VB.NET. It gives you a broad intro to several facets of .NET including web services which look very interesting! I think my experience with the book would have been excellent if I would have been more prepared. I have now back-tracked to fill in some of the basic knowledge I needed. I now believe I could forge ahead with some basic database projects in VB.NET using this book as a reference. I would certainly buy it again and I'm sure I'll use it as a reference for some time to come. Get some basic VB.NET knowledge and then buy this book for learning the database specifics.



2. This book had a lack of examples.
   Poor presentation.
   The little snippets of code it used to navigate through
   the book were very dificult to grasp since there are no
   example to demonstrate that they work.
   I have been thru just under a dozen .net books. This is
   one of the worst alongside ithe vb.net unleashed book.
   It was very easy to give up reading this book since you always
   wonder if the code you type is ever going to work or
   is that the reason why some of the the code was not downloadable



3. Since this book has 3 authors, it would be interesting to know who wrote what parts. Some parts are very good, with understandable examples and clear explanations. Other parts I just scratched my head and wondered.

   It's not that I didn't understand what they were doing, it's that I wondered why they were doing it. It seems they went out of their way to make parts of the code complex and confusing.

   The main program developed in the book, the Product Management System, took 4 chapters. It could have been a great example of a simple program that taught the main points of database programming.

   However, parts of the code was poorly designed and written, resulting in the program being overly complex and not functioning like a professional program should.

   I feel that if you are teaching someone, you should show them the right way to do it. As a beginner in VB I am looking at the whole picture. Just because this book is about database programming, the authors should not ignore the quality of the rest of the language in their example code. Is it too much to ask the professional programmers who write books to write professional quality programs?

   I currently don't have a better book to recommend. I've started reading another book I got from the library, but I don't have an opinion yet. To bad the library doesn't have more books on VB so I could try before I buy.




4. For people with some experienced on VB .Net, this book will serve as a very good introduction on the basic skills on database programming. Not only have the authors done a good job on showing how to use ADO .Net, but they have also done a very nice job of showing how to apply the skills of objected-oriented programming techinques. Base forms are developed and then inherited to develop more sophisticated windows forms.I strongly think that this book is worth reading.



5. The book is generally good for a beginning book. The problem is that you can no longer get the Sample Code as the publisher WROK has been sold and is no longer keeping the old sample code on their site.