Review - XML Hacks

[Dave Cross]

I believe this removes me from the naughty list (where I've been since 
getting this book to review over a year ago)

Also online at http://dave.org.uk/reviews/xmlhacks.html

Dave...



Author(s)  	Michael Fitzgerald
Publisher 	O'Reilly (2004)
ISBN 	        0-596-00711-6
Reviewer 	Dave Cross

As a Perl programmer, my first instinct when given some XML to process 
is to grab the appropriate Perl module (probably XML::XPath or 
XML::LibXML) and use that to do whatever I need to. Although that 
usually gets the job done, reading this book opened my eyes to a number 
of other XML processing tools that will sometimes be more useful than a 
Perl program. Actually Perl doesn't get mentioned at all in the index, 
whereas Java gets half a column of entries.

A lot of the book isn't aimed at the kind of person who is comfortable 
firing up an editor writing a program. Many of the hacks introduce 
ready-made applications that handle a number of different XML tasks. For 
example there are applications that, given an XML document, will take a 
first pass at creating an XML Schema or DTD for the document. This is 
something that would be an interesting project to write for yourself, 
but if you just need the schema it's nice to know that someone else has 
already written the application for you.

One of the most interesting chapters for me was the one about editing 
XML. My usual tool for that is xml-mode in Xemacs but the book 
introduced me to a number of other possibilities. The one that 
particularly caught my eye was nXML for Emacs. Unfortunately it's not 
currently compatible with Xemacs, so I need to try out some of the other 
editors that are discussed.

Like all of O'Reilly's Hacks books, this book is aimed at a very wide 
audience. Some of the tools are Open Source and some of them are 
commercial. Some of them run on only one platform and some of them will 
run anywhere. That has the potential to be a little frustrating when you 
find a tool that looks really useful, only to find out that it only runs 
on Windows. Fortunately the authors are aware of this problem and make a 
real effort to present tools that run on as wide a range of platforms as 
possible. If one hack presents a tool that only runs on Windows then you 
can be sure that the next hack has a similar tool that runs somewhere else.

The audience is diverse along other dimensions too. There are hacks 
aimed at people who will just want to save a Word document in DocBook 
format (hint: use OpenOffice) and at the other end of the spectrum there 
are hacks aimed at people who want to create SOAP services. There are 
hacks aimed at all levels of producing and using XML.

It's an inevitable consequence of this type of book that not everyone is 
going to find all of it useful. But the authors are obviously experts in 
their field and they explain themselves very clearly. I thought I knew a 
lot about processing XML but I discovered a lot of new and interesting 
things from this book. If you want a good overview of the various ways 
that XML can be useful to you, then this book would be a very good start.