Complete and authoritative reference, terrible format

I have never had a question about XPath that wasn't answered by this book. I appreciate having an authoritative reference written by someone who was deeply involved in the development of the standard.

However, this book (and its companion XSLT reference) is perhaps the worst-formatted reference book I have ever seen. Much of the book consists of an alphabetical reference of XPath functions. Unfortunately, the page headers and footers only contain page numbers and chapter titles. They do not contain the name of the function that is described on that page. So you can't just riff through the pages watching for your function to appear in the footer.

There is a heading for each function name, but the font used for the sub-headings are as large as (if not larger than) the major headings. There are no page breaks between functions. So you can't even visually scan the pages looking for your functions.

Finally, the table of contents consists largely of function names on the left, with page numbers on the right, separated by about five inches. But there are no dot leaders between them. So, even when you resort to using the table of contents to find the section you need, you have to use a ruler to find the page number.

Other Reviews

• very good reference
• Complete and authoritative reference, terrible format
• Utility manual
• Highly Unpractical, Only Good If You Already Know It
• Not the author's fault (I think)