Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML

This is not a book explaining XML. This is not a book that goes into any depth on XML APIs. It is not a book explaining any one XML format like XSLT, RSS, or XSD. Instead it is a book on how to work with XML. How to design an XML application to take full advantage of the facilties of XML: schemas, processing instructions, XSL transforms, namespaces. It is all structured to slowly introduce you into the complexities, and deserves to sit up on the bookshelf with Effective C++, Java and Enterprise Java. If you already know the basics of XML, it is actually quite a good way to learn about some of the more esoteric concepts -from the pragmatic perspective. Too many XML books rant about how wonderful some feature like XML schema's extension stuff is, why XML is the most universal format ever, SOAP and WS-* the best protocol for distributed systems ever, and XQuery everything you need for an XML database. This book bursts the bubble of hype with rational analysis of what makes sense, and what doesn't. Item 28: Use only what you need, is my favourite: A review of the main XML specs and analysis of what really matters, which comes down to #35, navigate with XPath. If you are designing an XML schema/system/application, you need this book. If you have to put up with architects telling you about WS-MetadataExchange, WS-Transfer and RDF, you need a copy to roll up and hit them over the head. And, if like me, you are involved in standards bodies that produce XML related things, you need to buy a copy for all the other participants, so that what you produce will actually work. Remember that XML is a language designed for use by people and machines. The machines have the upper hand. But with this book, and some thinking, you can design XML applications that people can use.

Effective XML is a collection of about 50 tips for working with XML. Although XML seems is simple and easy to use, it's also easy to get wrong. I've often scratched your head and wondered why things like XML Schema, for example, just doesn't feel right. But it wasn't until I read Effective XML that I understood what was really awkward with it. Because the book is so diverse (an amazing feat considering the small page count), it is hard to single out any specific part as being a reason to read the book. The book doesn't just talk about schemas, the infoset, etc..., it digs down and really explains what is good and bad about the technologies and what the best ways to apply them are. All I can say is that I use XML day in and day out and have learned everything I know by trial an error. I've made many mistakes along the way. I've tried my best to learn from them, but Effective XML was the book that made everything click for me. The best part is that the book went well beyond just helping me see my errors. I've already applied some of the ideas to new work I've done recently and have been able to head off some of the problems I would have encountered. Effective XML is by far the best XML book I've ever read, and quite possibly the best tech book I've read all year. I might even have to add it to my favorite tech books list. If you work with XML to any significant degree, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

There are plenty of generic XML books out there, plus a bunch of titles that focus on specific XML applications or XML related topics (SOAP, XSLT, XML Schema etc); what Mr Harold delivered this time is something different, that really stands out from everything else available at the time of this writing. This book is about best practices, patterns and anti-patterns, and about how to use XML correctly and efficiently. As with other titles from the same author, this book is a pleasure to read, clean, informative and well structured. In my opinion a must have for the serious XML practitioner. Be advised this is not a book for beginners, the author takes for granted you already mastered the fundamentals of XML and many related technologies like DTD, Schema or Namespace. In order to really get the best out of it you better have some experience using XML under your belt.

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, adatabase, or both at the same time :).On the other hand, if you are a developer, chances are that you feel thatthere is not much to it. After all, it may take just a few hours to get thehang of creating and parsing an XML document. Maybe this is why most ofthe voluminous books discuss numerous XML-related technologies, but not the XML usage itself.Elliotte Rusty Harold in "Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve YourXML" takes a different approach: know your elements and tags :) -- they arenot the same thing! -- and weigh your choices in a context, because anytechnology applied for the wrong reasons may fail to deliver on itspromises.Following Scott Myers' groundbreaking "Effective C++", the author invites usto re-evaluate seemingly trivial issues to discover that life is not assimple 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 relatedstandards, thus giving us specific advices on how to use XML correctly andefficiently.The 300-page book is divided into four parts: Syntax, Structure, Semantics,and Implementation. Yet in the Introduction the author sets the tone bydiscussing such fundamental issues as "Element versus Tag", "Children versusChild Elements versus Content", "Text versus Character Data versus Markup",etc. On these first pages the author started earning my trust and admirationfor his knowledge and ability to get right to the point in a clear andsimple language.The first part, Syntax, contains items covering issues related to themicrostructure of the language and the best practices in writing legible,maintainable, and extensible XML documents. In it, over 19 pages arededicated to the implications of the XML declaration !Doesn't it seem a lot for one XML statement that most people cut-and-pasteat the top of their XML documents without giving it much thought? Actuallynot, if you follow the author's reasoning and examples.The second part, Structure, discusses issues that arise when creating datarepresentation in XML, i.e. mapping real-world information into trees,elements, and attributes of an XML document; it also talks about tools andtechniques for designing and documenting namespaces and schemas.The third part, Semantics, explains the best ways to convert structuralinformation represented in XML documents into the data with its semantics.It teaches us how to choose the appropriate API and tools for differenttypes of processing to achieve the best effect. This chapter has a lot ofgood advise to make the solutions simple, effective, and robust.The final part, Implementation, advices on the systems' design andintegration issues related to the utilization of XML; the issues like dataintegrity, verification, compression, authentication, caching, etc.This book will be useful to a professional with any level of experience

... Harold has put together an advanced overview of ALLXML. A significant part of the value of this book is in Harold's assessment of the various proposed extensions to XML, like the XML Schema language, or the abovementioned XLink and XQuery. XML is still growing rapidly, and there is a real need for various extensions. But there is also a consequent need forindependent comparative assessments of those extensions. For example, if you have a book devoted to XML Schema, it might not even tell you that there are other competing schema languages.En passant, he gives an unusually clear explanation of the difference between a character set and a character encoding. The former is a mapping of some characters to numbers. The latter is an instantiation of those numbers as an actual numerical storage. Often in other books, you can see the two phrases used interchangeably and imprecisely. By contrast,throughout this book Harold emphasises a precision of terminology. A priori, if you are into XML, then you need to be precise.I have one minor quibble. He says that multiple XML documents "can be stored in a single file, though this is unusual in practice." He might have added that one of these instances is instructive. If you have a continuously running program that periodically writes to a log file in XML, then during the writing, for efficiency, you would append XML documents to the file. So notice that at all times, the entire file is not an XML document, because there are no enclosing tags.