5 comments about Java & XML for Dummies.

1. I have 18 years exp. with IBM BAL and I'm also doing some work with modern technologies. I have looked through many JAVA/XML books and this is definitely the best book for both beginners and advanced users. Author presents in good depth a vast array of present technology, samples are working like that!! It has helped me a lot to get a grip of advanced matter such as SAX, DOM, JDOM, schema, SOAP and so on... Some other nice features of this book is a good readable style and more than usual coverage of the main subject.
   I am grateful to the author for the enormous scope of what has been accomplished. And, of course, I'll try to follow the recommendation to buy another books by Barry Burd in two copies: one for my home, and another for my office.



2. If you're a Java developer looking to get up to speed on how XML/Java/XSLT/Web Services, and lots of other topics, then this book is a great place to start.

   The book doesn't pretend to (and says so) teach every topic it covers (XSL, for example is presented in context but not really taught -- that would take a MUCH bigger book). Still, with some familarity with the topics, the code presented is great. XML (part of the book's title) is covered quite nicely.

   It's assumed that you're somewhat familiar with Java.

   In my case, I needed to find some clear explanations of how to create an XML file and then read that XML file along with an XSL stylesheet (I was learning XSL using Java/XSLT by O'Reiley at the same time). Barry's JDOM chapter and the chapter on putting data on the Web solved both these issues.

   Don't get put off that this is a "Dummies" book. I have found it useful for at least two projects (the most recent I wrote about above).

   Also, when there was a minor problem with the code where IE 6 wouldn't recognize the stylesheet processing instruction when it was at the bottom of the XML file, the author was extremely helpful and responsive to this issue. He helped me research the problem and wrote me back with his findings.

   To put my review in perspective: I'm the kind of developer who likes to learn to walk before I learn to run. If you like to just jump into a complex book and wade your way though the material, then this book might not be for you. But, if you like to get a feeling for the technology and get relatively straightforward examples *working* first, then check out this book.

   Barry explains topics clearly and simply.

   All in all, I found this book to be completely refreshing compared to most of the books out there.




3. I am not sure what book the other two readers have read but it sure is not this one, I have been in the business for a number of years and the author offers trite remarks and even worse idioms to pad the book out. If you are interested in XML or Java I would suggest another book such as Mastering Java which actually tells you what Java and XML are for.



4. This was one of the gifts my son wanted for Christmas. He was so thrilled to add it to his "library". When I browsed through it, I discovered that it's even simple enough for me to understand!..ha ha
   Keep the Dummies books coming.



5. I'm a big fan of Barry Burd's books. This is the third book I've read from him. I bought it in 2008 and it was written several years earlier. This makes some of the material dated, but throughout most of the book, the examples compile fine. Before this book, I knew nothing about XML but knew how to program in Java. And by the time I was about a third of the way through the book, I had one of my Java programs pulling in an XML feed and displaying the results. I would recommend this book after you read Barry's Java for Dummies.

5 comments about XML Programming Bible.

1. Because I do a lot of XML and XSLT my shelves are littered with XML and XSLT books. Although the information I am looking for is somewhere on the shelf, I sometimes have a hard time finding it. The first part of the XML Programming Bible largely fixes this problem. It provides the core information in an easy to find manner. For example, the XML Schema (XSD) elements are alphabetically listed as a group instead of broken out on the basis of there task. It also includes the type of minutiae I occasionally can't avoid - like the long list of the current DOM working drafts. This part of the book hit the right slot for me between a primer and deeper reference texts that sometimes obscure basic information with more details than I want to accomplish a given task.

   The second and third sections offer an overview of using XML in Office and J2EE respectively. The fourth section is an overview of interacting with relational data. This part is a light reference into technologies like SQLXML but it should be enough to get you started, such as interacting directly with SQL Sever with FOR XML and updategrams. The book ends with four sections on Web Services. The nice thing about the WebServices sections is that it covers a bunch of technologies used on both .NET and Java/Unix platforms. The coverage of individual technologies isn't deep, but it's enough to understand the basic approach and capabilities of each tool. I don't need this type of information often, but nothing previously on my shelf covered this range of technologies.

   This isn't a book for rank XML beginners. It doesn't spend waste explaining well-known fundamentals or the grisly history of schemas. Nor is it an in depth reference on any of the topics it covers. But it captures the depth I need when I'm trying to remember some specific piece of information, need a quick review, or need to dive into something I haven't done before - like working with XML from Excel.




2. As a graduate student who had "heard of" XML and was given a brief (as in a half of a powerpoint slide) introduction, I found myself in need of a XML reference book for the new job I had taken. My first choice was unavailable at the local Barnes & Noble so I picked up a few book and browsed the pages that were related to what I was going to be doing (updating parser and API code). Not only was able to find what I was looking for in this book, but in the twenty second glance that I gave it I noticed that the physical layout of the book was easy on the eyes.
   
   The books pages seemed to be made of the same material most for-pleasure reading books are composed of instead of the college textbook type material. While that may seem trivial to some, what good is a book if the pages within it evoke memories of long, don't-want-to-read-five-more-chapters-but-I-have-to-study-for-test-in-six-hours days? Its still a reference book but every little bit helps.

   Like the original, this bible uses examples to help illustrate the various topics covered in the book. The examples are to the point and pretty easy to understand, and where necessary, some screen shots are provided to help as well. The book also has a very comprehensive listing of methods, their parameters, details of their usage, and what APIs/languages/libraries support them. The contents are well laid out, most of the time you can simply just start skimming and quickly find what your looking for without even visiting the index.

   In all honesty, if you have never programmed anything more than a VCR in your life, this book is probably not something that you should start with. However, if you are going to be doing anything XML related then this a very good book to have within arms reach.




3. Brian covers the topic areas complete, with examples and walkthroughs. Anyone who will touch more than 1 or 2 implementations of XML should have this book in their library.



4. As a follow-up to the XML 1.1 Bible review, I took a look at the XML Programming Bible by Brian Benz with John Durant (Wiley). For those who want to use XML within their application development (as opposed to just web pages), this is the perfect follow-on book to have.

   The chapter breakout...
   Part 1 - Introducing XML - XML Concepts; XML Documents; XML Data Format and Validation; XML Parsing Concepts; Parsing XML with DOM; Parsing XML with SAX; XSLT Concepts; XSL Transformations; XSL Formatting Objects
   Part 2 - Microsoft Office and XML - Microsoft XML Core Services; Working with the MSXML DOM; Generating XML from MS Access Data; Creating an Excel Spreadsheet from an XML Data Source
   Part 3 - XML Web Applications Using J2EE - XML Tools for J2EE: IBM, Apache, Sun, and Others; Xerces; Xalan; XML APIs from Sun
   Part 4 - Relational Data and XML - Accessing and Formatting XML from SQL Server Data; Accessing and Formatting XML from Oracle Data; Accessing and Formatting XML from DB2; Building XML-Based Web Applications with JDBC; Transforming Relational XML Output into Other Formats
   Part 5 - Introducing Web Services - Web Services Concepts; SOAP; WSDL; UDDI; Microsoft Web Services; J2EE Web Services
   Part 6 - Microsoft .Net and Web Services - Creating and Deploying .Net Web Services; Accessing .Net Web Services; Building a .Net Web Services Client
   Part 7 - Web Services and J2EE - Web Service Tools for J2EE: IBM, Apache, Sun, and Others; Web Services with the Sun Java Web Services Developer Pack; Apache Axis; Access Web Services from Java Applications
   Part 8 - Advanced Web Services - Accessing Relational Data via Web Services; Authentication and Security for Web Services; Index

   I think I got finger cramps just typing all that! :-)

   Seriously, there's really good material here. The assumption is made that you already understand basic XML technology. Benz doesn't spend an inordinate amount of time covering introductory material. Part 1 does do a bit of that, but only enough to establish the basic direction for the rest of the book. There is much more attention paid to XML concepts that come into play for programmers, such as the document object model of XML and how the two types of parsers (DOM and SAX) work. The rest of the book is highly practical, with examples of how to generate or access XML data using a variety of platforms, such as Microsoft Office, .Net, J2EE, Oracle, etc.

   For me personally, I appreciate the emphasis on code and working examples. I have always learned more by taking something that works, tearing it apart, and using it as the basis for my own efforts. Benz has provided many examples that provide just that opportunity. Being that he doesn't restrict his writing to a single platform (like .Net or J2EE), this is one of few books that have a cross-over appeal to many technology platforms. If you happen to work in a shop that uses both Microsoft and Java technologies, you'll be able to get a single book that will assist you on both sides of the fence.

   Basically, there's nothing I can find fault with for this book. It's solid writing of essential information you need for using XML in your various applications. This is a book that gets my highest recommendation.




5. This book does a great job at describing XML. It does not contain any exercise (although it contains some codes) to help you get your feet wet.
   This is a good reference book. If you are a beginner, you will still need another book to help you get started.

5 comments about Office 2003 XML.

1. Hurrah! Microsoft has said for several years that it strongly supports XML. Well MS Office 2003 is one of the first major products that conforms to this. As you probably know, earlier versions read and wrote to Microsoft's own doc format. A binary format. Third party developers then had to write code to read and write files in this format. Doable, but certainly an aggravation to some, given the complexity of the format.

   Which is why MS Office 2003 was eagerly awaited. Now, XML is a fully supported data format. It also lets you see in an easy and direct way the complexity of deciphering the doc format, if you had never tried to do that firsthand.

   Here, the book walks you through the various XML outputs and their associated schemas. There is the usual XML verbosity. (No surprises here.) But you can now read, in plaintext, how the suite structures its code in an OO fashion. So much nicer!

   Not that the book is trivial. Many examples show how a lot of XML's capabilities are used. Like namespaces, XSLT, XSL and XPath. A reassuring point is that your needs might not have to extend to all these usages. The book also has many very simple XML examples that could be germane.




2. I've read the Addison Wesley book on Microsoft's new Office XML standards and this book is much much better. The book covers four applications; Word, Excel, Access and Infopath. It covers both the storage XML format for Word and Excel, as well as the use of XML within Word and Excel itself from the end-user side. The coverage of the storage format is excellent, and that, being a developer, is something I can appreciate.
   
   For end-users of Word and Excel who are just looking to consume XML in your document or spreadsheet, or to mine XML using Infopath, this is a well written book that is worth your money and you can ignore the technical segments. For engineers looking to work with the new Microsoft XML storage formats you will find a lot to like here, and you may just find some cool things to do with XML to do on the forward facing end-user side of the house.



3. This book answers a very specific need - you are working with the new Office xml formats. If you are directly reading or writing WordML, SpeeadsheetML, or the other xml formats - stop what you are doing, buy this book, and read it. It will put you miles ahead.
   
   Clear, concise, and about as complete as it can be with Microsoft's incomplete documentation to work from. I had it open on my desk next to me the whole time I was working with these file formats.
   
   It has some stuff for InfoPath and Office WebServices. I didn't read those part but the rest is so well written I would bet that part is indespensible too.



4. Clear, concise, and packed with practical knowledge. I work with XML, XSLT, and C# for a living, and this book had me using XSLT to whip up WordprocessingML documents in no time. I especially appreciated learning how to turn off the default "Word" display of ML documents in Internet Explorer. I'm also using Evan's great XSLT that mimics Word's "data-only" output format-- as part of a process to validate foreign tag sets in WordML documents. Thank you!



5. This book provides a good overview of Microsoft's Office XML formats. In addition to covering these formats, it also provides some useful material related to Microsoft Office smart documents, an extension mechanism for Microsoft Office applications.
   
   Note: Microsoft Office XML is completely distinct from the Open Office.org XML format (OASIS OpenDocument) which is not covered in this book.

No comments about Sams Teach Yourself .NET XML Web Services in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself).

5 comments about Professional Visual Basic 6 XML.

1. This is has been a disappointment for me. I purchased this book because of a project I am working on. It told me everything I already know and gave terribly laid out examples.

   I was never quite sure working through the examples if the code was required or if the Authors were merely showing us what they could do with XML/VB.




2. The following is a sentence from page 131 paragraph 1 of this book: "After declaring a generic Node object to serve as the parent node for the new node, and a variable to hold our function response, which we optimistically set to True - which will be changed if our attempt at adding the node fails, we check to see if the node index is within bounds, using IsNodeIndexOK, described just after this function."

   The logical flow to the entire book in not much better.

   This makes learning anything about XML and VB difficult. I have spent more time attempting to determine what the authors are tring to say than I have learning about XML.

   I was able to work with the sample code to some extent. But even the sample code was incomplete and more difficult to follow than necessary.

   With a complete rewrite this could possibly be a good book.




3. I purchased this book to learn to do DOM programming, not to use the code provided by the authors. I was hoping for clear examples, instead I got a book that expects me to download their sample code or type it all in (and there is ALOT) in order to easily follow the samples. Typically this would be fine, but a majority of the functions and classes you can download are poorly explained, or not explained at all. This book is more like instructions on how to use a lot of code written by the authors to manipulate XML.
   I own two other WROX books, these book were easy to follow and gave just the right amount of code to get me going. This book does neither. Big disappointment.



4. Although Microsoft has moved on to VB.net, many developers are still using VB6. It has become increasingly hard to find VB6 XML info on, say, MSDN, so a book like this is essential.

   The code examples are clear and practical. The book manages to work well both as a how-to and a reference. If I were to nitpick, there are two things would mention. First, because of when the book was published, it does not cover the most currenrt version MSXML. However, porting the code samples to newer versions of the DLL is quite easy. Second, the book does not come with a CD. An HTML or PDF version of the book, with a searchable index, would be sweet.

   Overalll, though, this is a good deal if, like so many, you are still working with VB6.




5. According to an e-mail I recieved from Wiley, "Wrox Press Book Company was liquidated in the Spring and no longer exists. The books were sold to various companies. Wiley acquired only 34 of the over 350 books and the rights to the www.wrox.com website address. You'll find the complete list of books currently available from Wiley/Wrox Press at http://www.wrox.com/misc-pages/booklist.shtml "

   This book is not on that list. That means that the publisher no longer provides support for it, and it will probably never be updated.

   I bought this book because it was one of the very few books available that covers using XML in Visual Basic. Altho not the easiest book to follow, it does contain a great deal of useful information. Unfortunately, both VB and XML are changing rapidly, and the information is getting out of date fast.

   By the way, don't even bother sending in the registration card that comes with this book. Wiley didn't renew the business reply permit, so the card will just bounce back in the mail.

5 comments about The Semantic Web: A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management.

1. This book is well written and comprehensive. It clearly explains highly complex subject matter. I refer to it constantly.



2. Different people will not agree on exactly how to define all concepts.
   As a result there will be ontological mismatchs across parts of the
   web designed by different people. In conventional logic if even one
   inconsistency exists it will be possible to draw all conclusions and
   their contradictions! It is not explained how they will prevent this
   from happening.



3. Painstakingly, in a literal sense, read from cover to cover without learning much about semantic description and search (more pedestrian XML technologies, eg, XPath were covered well). Some of it, eg, on Topic Maps, is impenetrable. Very light on interesting and compelling usage and how-to of the more ambitious, semantic technologies that are the reason most would buy a book of this title.
   
   And so, unfortunately, I agree with the negative assessments already given here: little practical information for implementers and on the contrary, the considerable time spent in attempts to decipher will not be justified, in my experience, with their pay off in knowledge that is useful or memorable.
   
   To be fair, part of the problem, from what I gather by its absense in the book, is that the W3C semantic web technologies are not even attempting to solve any part of the ultimate problem of semantic analysis: natural language understanding. Instead the highest goal in this presentation is the /manual/ cataloging of /whole/ documents (and emails, customer questions, etc).



4. This book can be a good general introduction to semantic web technologies, to get an idea about how they can be useful inside your organization. The starting and ending chapters are rather good in this respect.
   But unfortunately the middle chapters, which try to explain the technical side in more detail, are somehow confused and hard to understand, maybe incomplete. The part about RDF is not bad and can give you some useful info, but things get worse when you get to topic maps and ontologies. Maybe this wasn't the main purpose of the book, but it's a waste of pages and reading time anyway.
   
   So, when you finish reading it, you can be excited about the topic and have nice ideas for implementing those technologies in your work/life, but you still are left clueless regarding HOW you should actually do it.
   
   It should also be noted that the book is becoming a little dated now: new technologies like OWL are more mature now, than what it describes. Not the authors' fault, of course.



5. The book throws around all of the right buzzwords: ontologies, XML, KIF, taxonomies, metadata, etc. However, it never even properly defines these terms or organizes the information. If you already understand what the semantic web is, the book makes perfect sense but you don't learn anything new. If you don't already understand what the semantic web is, you won't be able to make sense of the author's high level descriptions and diagrams and you won't learn anything either. You can go to Wikipedia and probably get better explanations of most of the terminology. For example the Wikipedia definition of ontology from a computer science perspective is : "In computer science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them." Why can't the author just SAY that??? Instead he wanders all over the map with a kind of philosophical musing about ontologies, and then proceeds to dissect a human resources ontology without ever properly defining why this model is useful in terms of the semantic web and what makes this model an ontology in the first place. The whole book is like this.
   The only reason I give it three stars is that there is useful albeit poorly organized information in here, and if you do know what the semantic web is and you have to present the information to management you can use the individual pieces of the book to probably stitch together a pretty good introductory presentation ... providing you already know what you are doing.
   However, I really recommend the book "The Semantic Web Primer" instead. It is more technical and better organized with much clearer explanations.

2 comments about Sams Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit (3rd Edition) (Sams Teach Yourself).

1. I'm only giving this 1 star because Amazon won't let readers give negative stars. The chapter that contains "a quick history of html" is so far off base, I wouldn't read the rest of this crappy book. The 'author' (I use that word very hesitantly) claims that HTML is 'a simplified version of SGML'. There was a bumpersticker in the early 70s that read "Question Authority", and boy! does it apply to this book! The book writer is NO authority on SGML nor on HTML, thus HOW could he be expected to be any kind of authority on XML? HTML is a DTD WITHIN SGML. It was not developed by 'physicists' to create 'web pages' but as part of Timothy Berners-Lee WWW project for collaborative sharing of documents. While it is true that Timothy began working on the pre-cursor to HTML while working as a junior programmer-consultant for CERN (which is a Physics lab) he was NEVER a physicist, but a designer of typographic-programs (at the time). BY THE WAY, XML is a SUBSET of SGML. SGML is NOT an 'overcomplicated' language, unless you happen to be a twit who can't program to begin with. That's like comparing VB to C. VB is for lazy programmers. C is a far more versatile programming language. It is the same with SGML. XML is to SGML like 'reader's digest' book versions are to the real book, or maybe like those synopsis books that kids used to use for book reviews of books they were too undisciplined and unethical to read.
   
   Don't waste your money on this book, and maybe it's time to forget all about Sams ' in 24 hours' books. CR*P.



2. The reason for 1 star is that i cannot put zero stars.
   
   The book tends to ramble on and on and is very light in actual examples that matter. The same concepts are repeated over and over again.
   
   It could of used many more examples rather than blabbing on and on about the same thing. Yet, an entire chapter is dedicated to SVG? Not a very focused book.
   
   Needs a lot of editing.
   
   Whole heartedly not recommended.

5 comments about XSLT and XPATH: A Guide to XML Transformations (The Definitive Xml Series from Charles F. Goldfarb).

1. I would agree this is more of a reference for the seasoned XPath/XSLT programmer. I'm a intermediate java programmer with some decent background in xml. I haven't really been able to get that much from this book in the way of examples. It's very light on examples.



2. I suppose this book might be helpful as a reference, but to someone who is actually trying to figure out what to do with xslt and xpath, this book is a very poor primer. I found that, in addition to offering little explanation as to how xpath and xslt are needed in a larger context (is this supposed to supplant sql??, for example), the examples are so error-prone that I learned more by correcting the errors than I did reading the book. Here is a list of errors you will encounter (from the CD) for the first 3 chapters:

   1.1 (string not quoted)
   1.2 (only 1 top-level element allowed).
   2.1 (invalid character)
   2.4 (cannot locate resource)
   2.5 (template.xml undeclared namespace)
   2.7 (cannot locate resource)
   3.2 (output.xml invalid at the top level)
   3.3 ditto
   3.4 worked -- hey, a working example!
   3.5 (output.xml invalid at the top level)
   3.6 misplaced period
   3.7 invalid at top level
   3.8 only 1 top level element allowed
   3.9 invalid at the top level...

   The rest of the chapter examples are similar to this one.
   Without good examples, a programming book is almost worthless.




3. This feels like a book that had it's table of contents laid out, and then the content filled in as quickly as possible. Editing must have lasted about 3 days. With a more thorough editing process, and a bit more thought to the examples (the boulevard examples taumatized me so much, I nearly stopped driving), it may have been a very good book.

   In some sections, the same paragraph is repeated verbatim 2 or even 3 times. Often in the chapter overview, and then on the next page in the first chapter section.

   Possibly the book appeals to other learning styles better, but I've found it a tough slog. In fairness though, XSLT is a strange and difficult beast- I may be transferring some of my frustration on to the messenger!

   However, in general, I find the examples are too repetive, causing them to blur together. And you find myself flipping back as many as 6 pages at times to find the xml code the description is talking about.

   And there is a lack of technical illustrations to help with more difficult topics.

   I would have appreciate larger examples from different domains to specific goals. The problem with a lot of the examples is the purposelessness of the examples.

   XML in a Nutshell, and Michael Kay's XLST reference have provided me much more joy.

   My last word of advice- follow the examples live. XSLT and XPath need practice, and lots of it.




4. I've had this book on my shelf since publication. I had to dig it out last week to do some fairly complex XSLT programming. The book was a huge help and helped me get everything done quite quickly.
   
   I use this book as a reference book, not a how-to. This book is great for things like "what is the function that does 'x' and what are its arguments?" It probably helps that I know XML pretty deeply, so I don't typically look at the examples. Of course, that might be because the docs on the functions in the book are so good that I find I don't need to look at the examples.
   
   XSLT hasn't changed much since this book was published. If you deal with XSLT, and, by extension, XPATH, get this book for reference.



5. I love this book, they are no longer printing this book, but if you can grab it, grab it! It's truly amazing. Love this book and it comes with a CD.

5 comments about Programming Web Services with XML-RPC (O'Reilly Internet Series).

1. overall an okay book. charpter 3 is poorly written (no complete example showing how to use servlet as XML RPCserver! perhaps the author have never done it himself) the reader should wait for a better book on this topic.



2. This book explains fully how to use XML-RPC in five languages: Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and ASP. Becuase XML-RPC is so simple to use (I got it working for both Java and PHP), it does not take much explanation to set up this technology and actually use it. This book is a good up-to-date reference for this technology, which will has been established and is being implemented in more and more languages as time progresses, making this technology an alternative to CORBA.
   This is a small book, because the subject is very easy and fast to learn. By using the Universal Language XML, This technology enables programs in one language to call procedures in programs in another language across the internet, regardless of firewalls, because it runs on HTTP.
   Some of the possibilities of using XML-RPC are in SOAP applications, distributed applications, even internet games.



3. Good coverage but a bit repetitive since it explains
   the same thing for each of several languages. Only
   read the chapters you need... Sadly XML/RPC seems
   to be losing ground to .NET/SOAP which is a shame
   coz RPC is much simpler and less bandwidth intensive.



4. Not many people are aware of how the whole idea behind SOAP and, later, Webservices, started from XML-RPC. It covers some interesting background information on how XML-RPC was born, and good coverage of its strengths and shortcomings, plus examples in five different languages (Perl, Python, ASP, PHP, Java)



5. The book is dated, and some of the examples, like the ones using Python are out of sync with current libraries. But, overall, the book is still valuable.It begins with a nice forward from an XML-RPC insider - Dave Winer;he was intimately involved in the evolution of the XML-RPC spec and you get a rare glimpse into the discussions that resulted in the technology spec - something that you rarely find in tech books. The next best thing about the book are the authors - they are totally in charge of the subject being developers themselves and experienced authors. With reasonable examples,tips and insights on XML-RPC - the technology itself, plus various language implementations of XML-RPC libraries, this book written on an under hyped and flawed,but successful loose integration and web services technology is a good read. Apart from sections explaining the protocol itself, the major portion of the book is devoted to Java,Perl, and Python implementations of the standard, integrating web applications with XML-rpc using PHP,and bridging ASP and COM.

No comments about Java Tools: Using XML, EJB, CORBA, Servlets and SOAP.