XSL Companion, The

Customer Reviews

• Best XSLT Reference Available  Jan 8, 2001 (42 of 42 found this helpful)

  This is an excellent way to learn XSLT. The progression of chapters makes it both easy and exciting to read, in anticipation of learning about even more of XSLT's features.

  The book is well written, but there are at least a couple of typos in the examples. The description is generally clear enough that there will generally be no confusion (such as the ending " tag on page 132, instead of "" -- although the tag typo on page 127 causes more confusion).

  Filters, XPath expressions, and using named templates as subroutines are covered well, and many other useful tidbits are given, such as how to output in HTML format (no closing tags), passing comments through to the output file, and suppressing the output of unnecessary namespace declarations. Calling Java methods from XSLT is also covered.

  I especially liked the explanation of how to reorganize input into a completely different order in the output, as well as how to insert content from other XML files.

  The formatting language called "XSL" is also covered in detail in the last half of the book, if you have a need to learn it. Hopefully, browsers begin to support it soon.

  The only material that I wanted to see covered that wasn't is how to perform arithmetic expressions (multiplication, division, and modulus, for example, although addition and subtraction are supported and examples are given).

  This is the best XSLT reference that I've found, but beware that much of the examples do not work in Microsoft IE 5.0 (or even 5.5 -- even with the latest 3.0 msxml parser). There are several issues, one of which is that the "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" XSL namespace is not recognized and an older one must be used, instead). But the book references several parsers that *do* work with the latest XSLT spec, including XP and XT.

  This is really a great book on XSLT, XPath, and XSL!

• Converting XML documents  Oct 14, 2002 (34 of 34 found this helpful)

  Computing seems to have a propensity to generate an
  awesome acronym soup; two examples being XSL and XSLT.
  The difference between these is rather nuanced.
  Frankly, for most purposes, I would consider them
  interchangeable. But if you really want to know the
  difference, this book does a neat job explaining.

  Both have to do with manipulating XML documents. XSLT
  transforms an XML document into another document. The
  output can be XML, or any other format, with XHTML
  being a popular choice. XSLT does not necessarily have
  anything to do with presentation, per se. It is a
  declarative language, like SQL, and unlike C or java,
  which are procedural languages. If the latter is your
  background, this may be your biggest impedence
  mismatch. Takes some getting used to. But the text is
  clearly written to help you along.

  Pure XSL, on the other hand, is an XML based
  formatting language. It is explicitly for displaying
  documents. In fact, it draws many of its property
  names and actions from CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
  This was done to let those familiar with the latter
  pick up XSL quickly. There is a long chapter on XSL
  that goes exhaustively through its many properties.
  TeX and troff gurus will see numerous layout concepts
  redone here in new flesh.

  Overall, a very useful and up to date book. The
  examples and accompanying text do succinctly convey
  the meanings intended. This book has clarity. You are
  not deluged in unnecessarily complicated explanations.

  I do have some caveats. Firstly, tree diagrams are
  drawn from left to right?! Those from a computer
  science background are used to trees always being
  drawn from top to bottom. A minor thing, but still a
  little offputting. Like reading a book where all the
  pages are in landscape mode, instead of portrait mode.

  Secondly, XML is case sensitive, unlike HTML, as the
  author points out. So, for example, and
  mean the same thing in HTML. But and are
  not the same in XML. The problem is that in many
  places, the author writes a tag in a body of code, in
  lower case, like . But he then refers to it in
  the text as Root, capitalised for emphasis. This can
  be very confusing to an XML newcomer.

  Lastly, many chapters could have done with problem
  sets and possibly answers. I understand that this
  would add to the book length. But it would greatly aid
  the reader, by giving her something to attack, instead
  of merely reading. Subject retention and all that.
  Especially apropos because the subject lends itself to
  explicit problem composition. Answers are objective;
  not just some vague essay writing. Plus, unlike some
  other software topics, the questions and answers can
  be concisely stated. There is no need for a mass of
  source code.

• Excellent book; short, to the point and well written  Dec 30, 2000 (25 of 26 found this helpful)

  With index and all this book is just a tad over 300 pages. For the price you may be tempted to look to other books; I would urge you not to. After a in depth read of the first three chapters and a quick scan of the remaining chapters I feel this author is very capable of providing condensed information for the intermediate-advanced level developer. Any more than 300 pages would require unneeded "fluff" thrown in to attempt to make the book more useful to everyone, and would only frustrate the intermediate-advanced developer who's time is valuable.

  For my needs this book was perfect. It povided very detailed information on XSL and explained how XSL relates to XSLT and XPath, it also explained XQL. If you pick up a general XML book you usually will only find one or two chapters (two at best) discussing XSL. This book is intended as a companion to a general XML book (XML For Dummies, or this authors own XML Companion come to mind) this book assumes you know what XML is, what a DTD is, etc...

  I have searched for a book to teach XSL to perform complex filtering and grouping in the output, prior to reading this book I had read: XML for dummies (IDG Press) and Professional ASP XML (Wrox Press), this book goes into much better detail and is a pefect companion to both of the books listed above.

  The authors writting style is excellent, he provides many short examples of input/processing and output code in each chapter. He does not hold your hand and many of his descriptions have to be read a few times to fully grasp (XSL isn't as simple as you may think). Overall I feel very comfortable in saying this is the best book (and one of the only books) on the market to fully explain current XSL standards.

• Cutting edge book for a cutting edge technology  Oct 26, 2000 (14 of 16 found this helpful)

  The need for the separation of content from format in web design has been apparent for some time now. XSL is just the newest piece to be adopted. Combined with XML a designer is given great control over data flow and format within their web site.

  "The XSL Companion" teaches the webmaster how to implement this language. I found the book to be clear and easy to understand. The code example were helpful. While I still consider myself an XML newbie, I think this book will remain "close at hand" for all my future projects.

• Good, but not great  Jan 12, 2004 (4 of 4 found this helpful)

  A reasonable work on XSL, but certainly not the best. This book is neither fully a reference or an introduction. On the positive side the book provides a terse and intelligent introduction to the topic. On the negative side the explanation of a complex topic like XPath not covered in as much depth as it probably should be, and there are some extraneous sections on HTML and CSS which are better covered in other works. On the whole a good book, but not a great book. If you are interested in XSL you should try Michael Kay's XSLT Programmers Reference and Sal Mangano's XSLT Cookbook.