XSLT Quickly: A Tutorial and Concise User's Guide

by Bob DuCharme

Book Overview

A tutorial explaining how to use the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation to convert elements to attributes and read in multiple documents, at once offers a syntax reference and discusses... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1930110111
• ISBN13: 9781930110113
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Manning Publications
• Length: 298 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Quickly, goodly and nicely

I've just sent several months working my way through Bob Ducharme's Xslt Quickly, referred to here as XQ. It took me a little while as I can be a little dense. So can Xslt. This book, however, does a very good job of explaining fairly carefully, with real world examples, the basics of Xslt. While my background is in programming, however i work as a tech writer, Xslt programming was different from what i had seen in the past, and to be honest, i had my doubts about this language and its use with xml at all. It took me a couple of times to get my mind around xslt but suffice it to say that now i am hooked. XQ presents introductory material as well as features of the language/programming in good sized chunks. The sections are designed so that the reader can skip around if they want to, as well as a straight read. I had purchased an e-book version of the book when i thought i could no longer find my hard copy. (I of course found the hard copy version shortly thereafter.) This worked out well, as i felt much better making notes in the printed out version of the e-book. This is a good option to have. I feel that XQ has whetted my appetite to learn more about XSLT, while giving me a good foundation on which to work from. I think XQ can teach you some, simple, yet very powerful idioms within Xslt that you can use immediately. The writing is not dense or boring, yet it is pretty comprehensive. I would certainly recommend this! Russ Urquhart

One of my favorite XSLT books

This book, as the author himself put it, provides "task-oriented explanations of how to get work done with XSLT". I would define the audience that will benefit most as intermediate XSLT developers - you are expected to have some knowledge of XML and XSLT. Part 1 has a brief tutorial, yet too brief for a complete novice. Part 2 is what makes this book worth reading - it delves into typical tasks XSLT developers encounter: adding, changing, deleting elements and attributes, sorting, avoiding duplicates and many other. Perhaps, the book was planned as a "cookbook" to quickly look up "how do I...", but it is more than that: the author describes how things work in detail, shows the best way to perform a task, warns about subtle issues you would spend hours fighting with on your own. I found the explanations very useful: even reading about basic concepts can bring discoveries. There are more advanced topics too, like dealing with namespaces or recursive techniques; read about them, and more challenging tasks will not catch you unprepared.The book doesn't touch on really advanced concepts like the famous Muenchian grouping, but this is probably outside of XSLT's everyday repertoire and, therefore, outside of this book's mission.I found myself referring to this book often in JavaRanch's XML forum. Just recently when solving RSS namespace mystery, I posted a part of the stylesheet that prints namespaces (p.99) and here is the response: "That diagnostic transform is worth its weight in gold!"And I am neither the author nor a member of his family.

Dispels the Mists of Confusion

This is a great book. It hurts to see some people reveiew it with such real... venomous dislike. I suspect it's a style thing--if you're looking for a dictionary-like exhaustive reference, maybe this book isn't for you. Having said that, I have a low tolerance for lots of verbiage, yet DuCharme's book was totally clear to me. I can poke around in it and find what I want so easily. It is very well organized, and well indexed. It serves as an excellent overview of XSLT, and gets pretty advanced, too. This is a great book.

Beginner through intermediate

The books title sums it up. Need to do XSLT now? Go to chapter one, page 8 and you are up and running. This book is for the individual that has to code with a deadline. The pace of the book is perfect. An example is given that is straight forward, clear and explained throughly. Then on to the next example which will introduce another XSLT template with another explaination. Fortunately, the author, Mr. DuCharme, rarely spends time on obsecure points or has long discussions on advanced topics that only guru types care about. If you are just getting started,or you are an intermediate user, this is the one. Get it - Quickly.

Excellent tutorial for XSLT developers

XSLT is not an easy language to learn - mostly because it is close to Lisp rather than to well-known string processing languages like Perl.XSLT QUICKLY covers XPath, XML elements and attributes manipulation, programming issues like named templates (a.k.a. functions), variables, parameters, XSLT-specific constructs like key lookups, number and string manipulation.Readers will find _good_ ways to generate HTML, other markup and plain text from XML documents.I think this book is a must for software developers who want to write and test robust portable XSLT scripts. Simple, understandable and informative sample code is a true challenge for any computer book. I really appreciate samples from XSLT QUICKLY, they are easy for recycling in real-life applications. Also, like Oracle code samples, they are convenient to communicate development issues.Last, but not least, just in the preface we find an important clarification of XML/DTD/XSLT relationship, so readers will avoid a good deal of painful confusion.