[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: good book on XML
> -----Original Message----- > From: Peter Murray-Rust [mailto:peter@u...] > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2000 1:43 AM > To: 'xml-dev@x...' > Subject: Re: good book on XML > > I was recently asked to review three XML books for the Times Higher > Educational Supplement (the UK weekly magazine for HE). Among > others things > I noted the value of public online reviews (e.g. at > amazon.com - anyone can > post) from which I was able to find a lot of useful information (one > reviewer had listed a number of typos in one book). As an author and techical-book-wonk, I have a different opinion of amazon.com reviews. I periodically scan the reviews of books written by friends or colleagues, and I find the reviews to be fairly random and subjective. The fact that the majority of amazon.com reviews are anonymous and/or hotmail makes things worse, although amazon has recently taken steps to make posting anonymous reviews more difficult. My favorite amazon.com story was regarding Jeff Richter's "Advanced Windows" book, which for a while started getting a one-star review every three days from "A reader". It was obvious to anyone familiar with the book that some crackpot was stalking Jeff. However, the oblivious book buyer looks at the most recent 4 or 5 reviews and passes the book up. > I also > commented that > fixed-date paper books were likely to be of increasingly > limited value and > that the resources on the WWW itself were extremely > important. We have the > opportunity in XML to create a new approach to "books" since > we control the > technology of publication. An XML "book" is no longer static, but > distributed over time, place and society. I agree that the "regurgitate the docs/specs" kind of book is of limited value given the current technology churn rate in XML. However, if someone has a story to tell, I think a book can be written to last. Does the fact that many of the technologies that appear in Gamma et al have fallen out of favor make the book less valuable? I don't think so. Similarly, even though CORBA interest is on the decline, the Henning/Vinoski book is still on my top ten list of recommendations to anyone building distributed apps. I think that the traditional publishers (Morgan Kaufman, Prentice Hall, O'Reilly, Addison Wesley) generally are doing a good job of putting out books that remain relevant for more than 12 months. An interesting case study in publishing is wrox. Wrox is not a classic book publisher. Most (but not all) wrox books are really a collection of articles written by multiple individuals. Yes, there are exceptions (Grimes, Mohr, Esposito), but the average wrox book cover has more head-shots than Cindy Crawford's portfolio. In essence, wrox is in the magazine business, however, instead of subsidizing the publication with ad revenue, the cover price is roughly ten times higher than a traditional magazine. That doesn't mean that wrox stuff is better or worse than "traditional" books, it just means that one cannot generalize the wrox model to all books on the market. All of this stated, I see the virtual book approach is more of a viable alternative to wrox-style books than to the traditional "beginning-middle-and-end" kinds of books like Henning/Vinoski or say Stephen Mohr's book from wrox. However, why couldn't this effort be coordinated via Tim O'Reilly's XML.com site? Currently, XML.com typically publishes short articles, but the folks on the masthead seem pretty plugged in to the XML world. I for one would rather see something coordinated by folks with a grounding in traditional publishing than an ad hoc effort (which we should reserve for more important things like standardizing APIs ;-) ;-)). DB http://www.develop.com/dbox *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/threads.html ***************************************************************************
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