Comments on: Charles F. Goldfarb’s XML Handbook

By: Linda Zarate

Linda Zarate — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:27:40 +0000

There is nothing in this book’s title or product description that indicates that it teaches XML programming. If that’s the type of book you’re seeking I recommend “Definitive XML Application Development” by Lars Marius Garshol. If, however, you’re an architect, chief technical officer or IT functional manager this book will provide you with one of the most complete and comprehensive descriptions of XML that’s available.

What you get is a thorough examination of XML, from its SGML beginnings to what it has evolved into, how to use it to solve real business problems, and the related specifications. Because this book is over 1200 pages it can be overwhelming. However, you need not read it in sequence, or even cover-to-cover to get value. It’s a reference and a business case combined, and is best used as a resource in the architecture group or shared among developers who need to ensure that what is being developed is in line with W3C specifications. In addition, the overwhelming array of applications that come on the two CD ROMs will save a lot of time downloading trial copies from their vendors, and give you many choices to evaluate for internal use. It also saves expensive developer (or consultant) time and corporate bandwidth.

If you work with XML you’ll find this book to be one of the best general references you can own. Better yet, get “The Definitive XML Professional Toolkit”, which contains this book and two others, and you’ll have a ready-made XML reference library.
Rating: 5 / 5

By: edash

edash — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:25:02 +0000

I have never disliked a technical book more than this one. The table of contents looks great – lots of coverage of everything having to do with XML. The content though, is very disappointing. For the most part, every topic is covered at a very high level and the author’s biases are very generously woven throughout. I found several cases of overstatements and omissions of accurate information. (Perhaps it is already out of date?)

This book might be good for someone trying to get a high level view of all that XML is capable of infiltrating. For anyone that wants any real technical content, this will be a big disappointment.
Rating: 2 / 5

By: Merlin

Merlin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:53:32 +0000

It might not be enough for the code gurus, but then it all goes to the tools you’re using: for example XML programming has different flavors if you’re using .NET instead of Java.
For documents, schemas, etcetera and to get you on a page with the standard this has all the information you need.
It’s a “handbook”, a good one too.
Rating: 5 / 5

By: T. Clack

T. Clack — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:25:47 +0000

I have this book as well. I bought it expecting it to be the end-all, be-all of XML books…it was the end-of-all my interest in learning xml for quite about a year. The book is VERY informative, at a very HIGH level. The tutorials are lackluster, and not as robust as the back of the book and the Table of Contents would lead you to believe. I looked at a couple of people who gave this book five stars, and all I could think is “they must be paid to write this stuff professionally!” I’m not saying that they do (for legal reasons among others), but it does make you wonder…. James L. Fuqua has given nothing but five stars for his three or four reviews, and ART SEDIGHI has a WHOPPINg 8 pages of 5 star reviews. Very detailed reviews mind you, but all five stars. Anybook I see that’s been reviewed by him goes onto my ‘this book is suspect’ list immediately. I cannot believe that that man has read and bough 8 pages of technical books and find that they ALL warrant 5 stars….

In short. Don’t buy this book. If you’re looking for a good XML book I’ve heard < > is a good one (for advanced topics). I’ve ordered it but haven’t gone through it yet, and < > is supposed to be a good starter. I’ve browsed through it but can’t give a ringing endorsement yet. AllI can say is AVOID Charle’s F. GoldFarb and anybook written by him (or at least the XML HANDBOOK, 5th EDITION. IT SUCKS!!!!)
Rating: 2 / 5

By: ART SEDIGHI

ART SEDIGHI — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:00:11 +0000

It took Charles Goldfarb, Paul Prescod and many others, sixty-seven chapters to explain all there is to know about XML and XML related technology. This book must be the most complete reference book when it comes to XML: any thing from history of XML in Chapter 1 to VoiceXML in Chapter 46 and everything in between. This book is filled, and each chapter is appropriately marked with, Introductory Discussions, Application Discussions, Tool Discussions, Case Studies and Friendly Tutorials.
The author has broken the book into 24 distinct parts; each part can be studies independently as they are very well contained with background information, case study and appropriate discussions. The first part is devoted to readers who are not XML savvy, followed by three chapters of the basic XML use: Three-tier applications, E-Commerce and Integration. It is very much amazing to me how the author packs three very important topics in to less than one hundred pages, and gets the point across. If the topic get s a bit complicated like the chapter on Integration with the Web (chapter 13), the author quickly switches to a Case Study chapter and shows the reader how things are done by example.
"Content is King". Reading this phrase at the beginning of Part 5 tells you that Goldfarb knows what he is talking about, because content IS king. Content Management must be one of the best parts of this book. A case study followed by a chapter on content systems (Chapter 16) and a chapter on what the key components of a Content Management is (chapter 17) really wheels the context in and the reader gets a very good understanding of what this growing field is all about. "Content is King". Content Acquisition, which is covered in Part 10, is another very well covered set of topics. Being is a VERY complicated topic, the authors (guest authors and experts who helped with writing this section) start off by explaining what syndicators and subscribers are: Content providers and content receivers. ICE, a new protocol for content delivery created by the ICE Authoring Group is introduced and used thru out the chapter. The authors add:

"The ICE protocol defines a model for the ongoing management of syndication relationships, including the roles and responsibilities of syndicators and subscribers"

Using ICE:
- The syndicators can describe business rules
- The syndicators can create and manage catalogs of subscription offers
- A common format - XML, is used to exchange data between the syndicators and subscribers.
- Various delivery modes such as push or pull and frequency of delivery can be indicated by the subscribers
- The subscribers determine if content can be updated in delta format or otherwise
- The content can be received from and sent to many locations and repository types.

The authors show the power of the tool and how it can benefit the end user and their application content management needs.

"... If Web Services really is a revolution, it may be the first in history to be led by the parties in power."

Web Services are the next set of topics covered in this book and two parts (13 and 14) are devoted to Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture. The author starts by giving the reason and the background of where Web Services came from and why they are here. (This is very common for this author as he explains every XML technology first and gives the reason why it's here) The good thing about this section is that Web Services have yet to be proven and the author conveys that message well:

"Web services is a very far-reaching and ambitious vision, with implications for all Web users and, if the goals are achieved, for much of the economy as well."

The two big players in the Web Services world, mainly IBM and Microsoft helped in writing these two parts. It is very interesting to see that for the first time in a very long time, these two rivals see eye-to-eye about a technology such as Web services. A discussion of UDDI, the directory for discovering Web Services, WSDL, the Web Services Description Language, and SOAP are given. The icing on the cake is chapter 41 where experts from IBM talk about Service deployment and outlines the steps that need to be taken to do such task. The application that they deploy is very much useless, but the steps taken to deploy are priceless as they are very concise and clear. Service Oriented Architecture, their vision, methodology and benefits are given in chapter 42. The two main architectural patterns that are used today: service-centric design and the rich-client design are explained and are used as the groundwork to explain why SOA is a better approach to either of the two.

Jumping to the last few parts of the book where the author[s] has added tutorials of all the major topics that were discussed in the text. XML Basics, Namespaces, DTD are just the beginning of some of the tutorials that added towards the end of this book. Whole parts are devoted to XPath, XSLT and XSL. XPointer also gets its own section with a chapter devoted to XLink. The great thing about these tutorials are that they are self contained and can be read independently of any other chapter of the book. They are quick study guides when you need them.

C. Goldfarb, Paul Prescod and many experts that were involved in putting XML Handbook together did a great job in doing so. This book truly contains everything one needs to know about XML and XML technologies. Rating: 5 / 5