Inside XSLT

Rating:
Summary: repetitive, disorganized, badly proofread
Review: Although Holzner's previous XML book, "Inside XML" is my favorite book on XML, I found this effort to be substandard at best. The presentation is unclear and disorganized, and Holzner repeats himself incessantly, frequently on consecutive pages and sometimes even in consecutive paragraphs! For example, on p. 128 he explains that template conflict resolution is based on select specificity and then repeats this on p. 131 using almost exactly the same words but in a manner indicating that this is some new piece of information. Clearly this book wasn't proofread at all, by either the author or the reviewers. Finally, the lack of inclusion of a summary description of XSLT elements is unforgiveable. In summary, the book is too disorganized to be a reference and too confusing to be a tutorial. It has the feel of a book rushed into publication so that New Riders could add an XSLT title to its library. Michael Kay's book is a better reference and Bob DuCharme's book is a better tutorial.

Rating:
Summary: lacks real examples
Review: Although Holzner's previous XML book, "Inside XML" is my favorite book on XML, I found this effort to be substandard at best. The presentation is unclear and disorganized, and Holzner repeats himself incessantly, frequently on consecutive pages and sometimes even in consecutive paragraphs! For example, on p. 128 he explains that template conflict resolution is based on select specificity and then repeats this on p. 131 using almost exactly the same words but in a manner indicating that this is some new piece of information. Clearly this book wasn't proofread at all, by either the author or the reviewers. Finally, the lack of inclusion of a summary description of XSLT elements is unforgiveable. In summary, the book is too disorganized to be a reference and too confusing to be a tutorial. It has the feel of a book rushed into publication so that New Riders could add an XSLT title to its library. Michael Kay's book is a better reference and Bob DuCharme's book is a better tutorial.

Rating:
Summary: good book, but...
Review: I found the book good introduction to XSLT. However it could be more compact. In few places author use just past & copy to include paragraphs which he placed just few hundreds pages before. For me if something is explained in one place, author should not repeat it but just send reader to right paragraph in other part of the book.

Author try to cover all material also tools which can be used with XSLT. In detailed section about Java tools I will expect few worlds about Apache Cocoon. XSP is beyond scope of this book, but if using XSLT in JSP example is included then why not XSP?

For the rest is very good book, and material is explained in good way.

Rating:
Summary: Useful book
Review: Inside XSLT was my first exposure to XSLT. As such, I was expecting a good introductory tutorial. After reading the first 280 pages, the author had yet to explain how an XSLT processor works, and I more or less gave up on the book. In a language like XSLT where the results of your code are so intricately bound with the processing engine, it is hard to write good code without understanding the engine.

The author enjoys telling you what he's going to do, then shows you how he did it, and then shows the resulting output- but he almost never explains why something happened the way it did. This was a source of frustration for me in all the chapters I read.

The book is also a gratutious waste of paper. The same code and output are repeated in large chunks with minimal differences. The book could easily have been made more readable and more consise by cutting out some of this redundancy.

Lastly, not only are there frequent errors in the text, but the source code that you can download off the website contains the same errors, is sometimes incomplete, and sometimes doesn't even run!

Unfortunately, I do not have an intro XSLT book that I could recommend over this one. The book isn't completely useless though- if you already have a good understanding of how XSLT works, Inside XSLT makes a decent reference.

Rating:
Summary: Really, really helpful!
Review: The previous two reviews cover the detail...I will only add to them. I've looked through several XSLT books at length, and this one is by far the best. One of the aspects I like about the book is that it uses the same XML document throught. Various XSLT Transforms are preformed on the document and they systematically build in complexity and scope of features. The transforms start out very simple and progress at a comfortable pace. I'm very happy with it. Steven Holzner has become one of my favorite authors overnight.

Rating:
Summary: Frustrating
Review: The projects in the book all center around a single XML structure, planets in the Solar System. Althought the structure is easy to understand, it does not illustrate other more real world problems, so this book is not useful as a cookbook or idea book.

Secondly, the examples show the application of xslt in a simplistic and difficult to understand manner that falls short of the requirements of a reference. It also fails as a reference due to poor organization, poor index, and lack of comprehensive coverage.

Finally, I feel that the author moves too quickly and fails to illustrate complex concepts well enough for this book to be used as a primer.

Overall, I have found this book to be frustrating to use and would recommend that buyers save their money.

Rating:
Summary: "Inside XSLT" is inside out!
Review: The rear cover advertises that this book is "written for developers with XML experience". It might be good for such people with a GREAT DEAL OF EXPERIENCE in closely related topics--people who are looking for details; not being such, I cannot answer that with assurance. However, it certainly is not suitable for anyone else, being extremely difficult to follow for a computer scientist with 20+ years experience as a programmer and with fundamentals of languages and systems.

A problem is that the author, being concerned with "books out there never seem to give you enough examples, ... , they're not complete, and they are not up to date" has forgotten that most readers are likely to want to see the forest before inspecting any trees. Indeed, even readers curious about particular trees whose names they don't know will want first to find those particular trees, i.e., even for the programmer who knows XML but not XSLT, I do not believe this likely to be a useful book.

In a nutshell, this book is inside out. The first chapter prominently discusses details of current XSLT evolution that should be in a late chapter that is clearly labeled as being for the few readers who need to know the fine points, or in footnotes. Furthermore, the author seems so focused on examples that one must read much of an example before one understand what it is an example of and whether or not it is useful for one's concern of the moment.

Putting things differently, those programmers who entered the profession after a formal education will look for top-down explanations and patterns expressed in one or more of the languages that were used in their university courses, e.g., BNF, or Snobol, or some other formal means. They need this because one learns most easily from a basis of what one already knows. But one doesn't find it in this book; the non-normative DTD found at the back is neither a good substitute nor sufficiently alluded to in the early chapters.

The value of the book might be as a reference volume. However, since the author did not see it primarily that way, it is not organized with sufficient hints to make it a good reference volume.

Finally, the book is sadly dated, apparently because the author focused on being up-to-date. What I mean is that might be up-to-date in 2002, but the reader who needs to be up to date will in 2003 and later seek other sources if he is at all concerned about aspects that might have changed in this fast-moving topic.

In summary, I believe that 95% of potential readers would be better served by some other text book (now I have to find one for myself). The content is almost surely accurate, but it is not organized and cross-linked to be efficiently useful.

Rating:
Summary: Exactly what I needed
Review: This book proved to be just what I needed, and then some. This is the companion volume to 'Inside XML' by the same author. Having read that book first, I was familiar with the author's style. The author starts with a simple example, then explains each new topic by building around that same example. The companion volume provides (in addition to complete coverage of XML) an introduction to XSLT, and this book drills down to the details. I learned more about XSLT than I thought possible. Thanks for a great book.

Rating:
Summary: Good to start with..
Review: This is a good book to start with but definitely not the "all in one" XSLT book.
I would suggest to start XSLT with this book and then read "Learning XSLT" as well as "XSLT cookbook".

That combination would make you an expert in a couple of days.

This book follows the example of planets.xml and uses it consistently, but the example gets boring after a while.

Rating:
Summary: Good to start with..
Review: This is a good book to start with but definitely not the "all in one" XSLT book.
I would suggest to start XSLT with this book and then read "Learning XSLT" as well as "XSLT cookbook".

That combination would make you an expert in a couple of days.

This book follows the example of planets.xml and uses it consistently, but the example gets boring after a while.