XSLT

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D Tidwell

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Pages: 478 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0596000537

Pub: OReilly

Pub date: 2001-09-07

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 170058

Editorial Review:

Subtitled "Mastering XML Transformations", XSLT covers a core XML technology. XML is great for processing or transporting data, but it is rarely what you want as final output. Using XSLT, you can transform XML data into a presentation format such as HTML or Adobe PDF. You can also transform data from one XML vocabulary into another. This title is both a tutorial and reference, explaining the full use of XSLT and XPath expressions.
The book opens with a concise overview of XML and a guide to installing Apache's Xalan XSLT engine, which is used for the examples throughout. The next chapter puts XSLT to work, showing how to create and apply a simple style sheet. Chapter 3 introduces XPath, with the following chapter covering more advanced topics such as branching, looping, recursion, invoking XSLT templates with parameters and using XSLT variables. The following chapter deals with linking, the next sorting and grouping, and after that the author shows how to use the document function to combine XML documents. There is a detailed look at extending XSLT with Java, Javascript and other languages. To close the tutorial section the author offers a case study centred on a tutorial-building tool he developed, with the engaging name of Toot-O-Matic. The reference section occupies nearly half of the book, and covers XSLT and XPath. It is the best kind of reference, with detailed examples, comments and illustrations. Finally there is a brief guide to common problems and a glossary.

This is a fine book for those who need to get up to speed with XSLT, which must include most XML developers. It is also worth checking out Michael Kay's XSLT Programmer's Reference. Kay's book has a little more detail, while this title is more approachable for XSLT newcomers. --Tim Anderson

Reader Reviews:

Covers the bare basics (0/0 people found this helpful)

There are websites which will teach you as much as this book does for free. I would have expected a pretty comprehensive coverage of everything in XSLT in reasonable detail, but huge areas of XSLT 1.0 are not covered and I am still in the dark after looking at it about them. This is the first poor book from O'Reilly I've bought in over 14 years of IT Consultancy.

Does not cover xslt 2 / xpath 2 (4/4 people found this helpful)

The book is probably great but it doesn't cover the latest versions. There are significant changes, some of which make life a lot easier and so starting from here is probably not the best place

A difficult reference book, an unhelpful text book (2/2 people found this helpful)

This book is really not worth the money. The indexing is poor - it really is very difficult to find the answer to a specific question. The examples are pointless in that they are far to long to be typed in and you're left wondering what point they are trying to make.
I wanted to find out how to select a node based on two or more attributes. I couldn't find out how despite ages searching. In the end I came upon the answer by trial and error!
I would rather have seen a lot more smaller examples each demonstrating some functionailty or other rather than a few large examples.
Don't buy.

Intermediate to advanced... (1/3 people found this helpful)

This book is the next step up for all those people who are quite comfortable with XML. Also a great book for those of us who want to take XML to its fullest potential.

XSLT will allow you to manipulate your XML data in ways that you could only imagine and will make you understand why you learnt XML in the first place.

The book is another great from O'Reillys library of web development catalogue and like nearly all of O'Reillys books it doesnt dissapoint.

The also book includes howto convert documents in PDF's, etc.

A great book for the XML fan!

The stating point for XSLT knowledge (1/2 people found this helpful)

Comprehensive coverage of XPath, control structures, sorting and grouping and more makes this book a must have.
If you are planning to use XSLT and have either never used it before or aren't a power user, this is the book you need. As a web developer, I still refer to this book for all the essential basics. More experienced users may wish to buy "XSLT Cookbook" instead, but if you are an experienced XSLT user, you'll already have this book anyway!

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