Rating: 
Summary: Beginners Only
Review: The ideal reader for this book would know Java, but would know nothing about program generators (or compilers) and nothing about XML. They'd want to take things slowly, and wouldn't mind if they didn't get very far. In return, they'd get a surprisingly long introduction to "domain analysis", a decent medium-length introduction to XML and XSL, a quick look at using the Java DOM parser for XML, and some examples. I was disappointed with the lack of discussion of program generator basics, most fundamentally when to write a program generator versus when to write an interpreter, a parametric program, or as is more typically required, some mix of these approaches. And what about wizards, the most transparent modern incarnation of program generators? And how does this all interact with frequency of program generation and version control? There was no discussion of programming language basics like semantic versus syntactic well-formedness and error reporting, which have their peculiarities in XML and Java. A primary concern with the whole XML (not to mention Java) enterprise is scalability. There was no discussion of writing efficient program generators; SAX is only mentioned in passing! Even more surprisingly, there is no discussion of generating efficient code, the latter being a primary motivator for many program generation efforts. Despite the daunting number of pages, this book can be read in one sitting due to the huge font and wide margins.
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