No comments about MERCATOR RELEASES XML SCHEMA IMPORTER VERSION 6.5.(Product Announcement): An article from: EDP Weekly's IT Monitor.

1 comments about Java, XML, and the JAXP.

1. I found the book to be written and organized quite well, but the depth of the content and sample programs were disappointing. It is an excellent source of elementary information on XML, DTD, JAXP SAX and DOM; strangely missing is any mention of XML Schema. Also, the chapter on the Apache "Ant" project seems completely misplaced from another text. I buy a book looking for the author's interpretation of the "spec" and their wisdom. I expect to leverage the author's experience and learn best practices; otherwise I would just read the "spec" and save my money.

   I'm giving this book a higher recommendation than it may deserve, but 3.5 stars isn't a reviewer's option. If you're looking for an in depth book based on experience rather than summarization then this is not the book for you. Overall I can summarize the book as a handy reference that conveniently gathers the basic information on these subjects that is otherwise freely available on the W3C and Javasoft web sites.

No comments about DataPower and Contivo offer complete standards-based XML integration solution.: An article from: EDP Weekly's IT Monitor.

5 comments about Oracle XML Handbook (Book/CD-ROM package).

1. The book provides an overview of XML from Oracle's standpoint. Chapter one is a basic introduction to XML itself, but from that point onwards it is more about how Oracle integrates XML into its products & how you might use them to put together a technology solution.

   If you are already vaguely familiar with what Oracle offer, then there this is a good starting point to determine how to solve problems using their fairly extensive toolset. Then you will probably want to purchase another title that focuses more upon the individual tools you choose.




2. There are several problems with this book. One is that very little coverage is given to the Oracle XML SDK. I could not find useful documentation on TechNet regarding use of the XML SDK via PL/SQL. I had hoped that this book would provide examples of SDK and a more complete set of documentation. To my disappointment, this book does not provide much more than an overview.

   The other problem with this book is that it was written with examples for Oracle Application Server, which has been replaced by iAS. Bottom line, this book reads like it was written for the first release of Oracle's XML SDK. Your better off on TechNet and the newsgroups.




3. If you've ever tried understanding Oracle's XML offering from the technet documentation, you've probably given up in despair, as the information is available, but it's totally disorganised.

   Unfortunately, this book suffers the same problems. Many of the examples can be found on technet, and the organisation is no better. Like many Oracle Press books, this layout is poor, and the examples are either superficial or non-existent.

   Instead, try Steve Muench's "Oracle XML Applications." It's superb.




4. There is very little of value in this book that shouldn't be posted on Oracle's web site as a tutorial or whitepaper. It is expectedly Oracle centric, but only covers their products in a very broad manner without much meat. For example, Chapter 4: "Developing for an Oracle Application" is only 16 pages and simply provides definitions for the variety of Oracle-side web apps/extensions.

   If you really want to buy an Oracle XML book, then get the O'Reilly "Oracle XML Applications". Now there's a 5* book.




5. There is very little of value in this book that shouldn't be posted on Oracle's web site as a tutorial or whitepaper. It is expectedly Oracle centric, but only covers their products in a very broad manner without much meat. For example, Chapter 4: "Developing for an Oracle Application" is only 16 pages and simply provides definitions for the variety of Oracle-side web apps/extensions.

   If you really want to buy an Oracle XML book, then get the O'Reilly "Oracle XML Applications". Now there's a 5* book.

5 comments about Designing XML Internet Applications.

1. It's a pretty decent indication of the potential of the XML document/messaging structure, but lacks significant insight into designing any type of formal business application.

   Most of the book relies heavly on perl scripts for message processing. I wish some attention was directed at VB/ASP or CGI for message processing.

   With few XML books on the market, I would recommend this book, as it provides a good insight of the potential of XML.




2. I was looking for a clean and concise approach to XML. Instead I got the impression that this book was just an excuse for the author to squeeze in as much minutia on SGML as he thought he could get away with.

   It does give good background on XML along with a mind numbing amount of hype.

   Look elsewhere for a good introduction to using XML.




3. This is obviously a book where the authors commited themselves to writing a certain number of pages and then, half-way into the work they realized that didn't have enought material to cover it. The totally useless 100-page poorly-commented pre-release Java source code for a DOM-implementation in chapter 10 is a particularily good example of this.

   Another horrible chapter is chapter 11, which contains an explataion of user interface interaction that is so overly abstract but still so extremely stupid that I've used that particular chapter as an example of how a really useless book should be written.

   Also, early in the book the author explains that the book is amed towards rpogrammers. It's interesting to see that they hardly ever back their examples up with and source code at all.

   In short. Don't buy this book.




4. This is obviously a book where the authors commited themselves to writing a certain number of pages and then, half-way into the work they realized that didn't have enought material to cover it. The totally useless 100-page poorly-commented pre-release Java source code for a DOM-implementation in chapter 10 is a particularily good example of this.

   Another horrible chapter is chapter 11, which contains an explataion of user interface interaction that is so overly abstract but still so extremely stupid that I've used that particular chapter as an example of how a really useless book should be written.

   Also, early in the book the author explains that the book is amed towards rpogrammers. It's interesting to see that they hardly ever back their examples up with and source code at all.

   In short. Don't buy this book.




5. This is an actual excerpt from page 544: "Similarly, an output specification language may be associated with a recurring negotiation problem (or class of negotiation problems) as a way of describing that only agreements allowed by this language may be considered valid output for any specific problem instance belonging to the recurring negotiation problem."

   This was a bad book when it was published almost 6 years ago. Now it is bad and out of date.

3 comments about UDDI: Building Registry-based Web Services Solutions.

1. There are several resources that take a "reference book" approach when explaining a technology. While that solves the immediate problem of getting syntax right, it rarely helps in getting proper understanding about how a technology is suppose work within a solution. Such books also fail to provide an understanding of how and when to employ the specific technology while designing and implementing a solution to a specific problem. I found that this book has refreshingly taken a different approach --- looking at a technology from architect or technologist perspective. Sure, it has devoted about a third of the book to UDDI APIs, a section that will be useful for developers, but at the same time, it also provides several insights for senior technical members of a team. For example, the five usage models for business registries in corporate environment covers practically all scenarios in which a business registry-based application can be created. Some of the discussion, such as that on Web services ecosystem or on vendor-customer relationships and role of business registries in those is even useful for IT and business managers.

   Overall, I find it a complete book on UDDI -- one that caters to the needs of not only developers, but also senior technology staff in a team as well as IT and business managers for whom registry technologies are relevant.




2. This book spends a tremendous amount of pages per idea. There is a lot of code in the main text (should be on a digital medium or at least the appendix). And this code is even repeated in .Net and Java.

   Anyhow:
   It is a fast and swift read.
   You get some examples.
   You do find things you do not find in other books.

   My best recommendation for UDDI is still the corresponding chapter in Eric Newcomer's Web Services book.

   This book is part of the Hewlett-Packard Professional books series. Except for the cover design, this is (luckily) not noticeable at all. Well the company employs the authors.




3. Several books in the market gloss over the UDDI technology. It is usually an addendum to a book about Web services or service oriented architecture. It was a pleasant surprise to see that there is a book dedicated to this topic. I firmly believe that until registries such as UDDI become commonplace, the true vision of SOA cannot be achieved. The authors make several good points regarding this. I also liked the examples used in the book -- more real-world than registering hello world services.
   
   It's bit longer read, but totally worth it when you are writing and registering more complex Web services than Echo and 20-min delayed stock quote.

5 comments about XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk(TM) Servers (DV-MPS Programming).

1. I bought this book with high hopes (The author makes references to Ayn Rand after all) The book is very limited in its discussion of BizTalk and it is a very cursory verbose overview with very little substance. The author continually makes extranious references and fails on numerous occasions to define his terms. Someone needs to write a decent book.



2. I've had this book for a while and I can say that MS changed a lot of staff in their latest release. If you get this book you won't find many things the book talks about. My recommendation is to get Professional BizTalk by WROX(10 stars out of 5) and BizTalk Documented by Microsoft Press(8 stars out of 5)



3. Being new to XML, I learned quite a bit about xml and xsl from this book. Biztalk is basically an xml/xsl processing rule engine, so this background information was useful and appropriate. Once I finished the XML background chapters, the book rapidly spiralled downward. Most of the examples are actually web programming examples using this unpopular scripting language called 'Omnimark'. The section on Biztalk had very very little information in it. 'Professional Biztalk', though a little deep, is a much better book. This book should have been titled 'XML and Omnimark Programming with almost NO Biztalk'.



4. If you want to learn about Biztalk or XML or SOAP buy another book.



5. I could not find useful information in this book. It is not good neither for beginners nor for advanced users.

No comments about Reengineering Business for Success in the Internet Age : Business-to-Business E-commerce Strategies.

No comments about XML-Based Data Management and Multimedia Engineering - EDBT 2002 Workshops.

No comments about XML: The Dash for Dot.com Interoperability.