[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

recently received books

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: recently received books
• From: Liam Quin <liam@w...>
• Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 21:53:46 -0400
• User-agent: Mutt/1.3.28i

People seemed to like it when I did this last time... I got two
new books this week...

Mastering XSLT, Chuck White, Sybex 2002
Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman, New Riders, 2003

Mini-reviews at http://dirk.holoweb.net/~liam/xml/books/books.xml
(needs an XML+XSLT-aware browser)... or reproduced below...
these are based on a first look, not a careful reading, but I
wanted to share them sooner rather than later. I'll probably take
Jeffry Zeldman's book with me on vacation later this month.


*** Mastering XSLT, Chuck White, Sybex 2002

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.</p> <p>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.


*** Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman, New Riders, 2003

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's a lot more in here,
and overall it's definitely worth a serious look.



Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, liam@w..., http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
Ankh's list of IRC clients: http://www.valinor.sorcery.net/clients/

• Prev by Date: Re: Motivations for namespaces (sorry)
• Next by Date: Re: Big XML file
• Previous by thread: XML Advise
• Next by thread: XSLT way
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread