Rating: 
Summary: Another excellent "Effective" book
Review: Who nowadays does not know what is XML? There has been so much hype around it,
that some people think that XML is a programming language, a
database, or both at the same time :).On the other hand, if you are a developer, chances are that you feel that
there is not much to it. After all, it may take just a few hours to get the
hang of creating and parsing an XML document. Maybe this is why most of
the voluminous books discuss numerous XML-related technologies, but not the XML usage itself. Elliotte Rusty Harold in "Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your
XML" takes a different approach: know your elements and tags :) -- they are
not the same thing! -- and weigh your choices in a context, because any
technology applied for the wrong reasons may fail to deliver on its
promises. Following Scott Myers' groundbreaking "Effective C++", the author invites us
to re-evaluate seemingly trivial issues to discover that life is not as
simple as it seems in the world of XML. In each of the 50 items (chapters)
he gets into the inner workings of the language, its usage and related
standards, thus giving us specific advices on how to use XML correctly and
efficiently. The 300-page book is divided into four parts: Syntax, Structure, Semantics,
and Implementation. Yet in the Introduction the author sets the tone by
discussing such fundamental issues as "Element versus Tag", "Children versus
Child Elements versus Content", "Text versus Character Data versus Markup",
etc. On these first pages the author started earning my trust and admiration
for his knowledge and ability to get right to the point in a clear and
simple language. The first part, Syntax, contains items covering issues related to the
microstructure of the language and the best practices in writing legible,
maintainable, and extensible XML documents. In it, over 19 pages are
dedicated to the implications of the XML declaration <?xml version=...> !
Doesn't it seem a lot for one XML statement that most people cut-and-paste
at the top of their XML documents without giving it much thought? Actually
not, if you follow the author's reasoning and examples. The second part, Structure, discusses issues that arise when creating data
representation in XML, i.e. mapping real-world information into trees,
elements, and attributes of an XML document; it also talks about tools and
techniques for designing and documenting namespaces and schemas. The third part, Semantics, explains the best ways to convert structural
information represented in XML documents into the data with its semantics.
It teaches us how to choose the appropriate API and tools for different
types of processing to achieve the best effect. This chapter has a lot of
good advise to make the solutions simple, effective, and robust. The final part, Implementation, advices on the systems' design and
integration issues related to the utilization of XML; the issues like data
integrity, verification, compression, authentication, caching, etc. This book will be useful to a professional with any level of experience. It
may be used as a tutorial and read from the cover to cover, or one can enjoy
reading selected items, depending on the experience and taste. The book's
very detailed index makes it an excellent reference on the subject as well. In the Prefix to the book the author writes, "Learning the fundamentals of XML might
take a programmer a week. Learning how to use XML effectively might
take a lifetime." I am not sure about the "lifetime" -- it is awfully
long time for using one technology -- but for the most confident of us this
still may not be enough :) . Your term may vary, but I suspect that you
could shave off it at least a few months by browsing through it once in a
while. Most importantly, this will make you a better professional and make
you proud of the results of your work. Wouldn't this worth your while?
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