Not The Best Choice

This book chooses to forgoe some of the more standard tools for XSL translation that are on the market. The author instead uses alternate opensourced implementations (JDOM vs DOM). The problem with this is that in the real world, constraints often exist on your project such that you cannot use alternatives (oh no!). So instead of getting a robust book that explains how to implement DOM and translate, you get a book that wallows in the use of alternate methods and focuses on one thing: creating dynamic HTML. Honestly, this is a rahter tired subject in the XML world. I am more interested in how to translate XML to PDF or RTF or XL. I am not asking for a plain answer, but I was at least hoping for a very beginner approach.

I have spent a week trying to get an implementation going and there is so much that I do not understand. I was hoping that this book would remedy that. It, sadly, does not. The example code is too specific to really help with a real world (constrained) application (I am developing for Oracle systems and they include the standard parsers from org.wc3.dom and org.xml.sax, using others requires server updates that are not recommended). I cannot recommend other titles as I have not read many others and the ones I have read are not too helpful.

Good luck, but steer clear of this one, unless you don't mind losing fifteen dollars.

Other Reviews

• Great combination to Java and XML book.
• Very helpful introduction to XSLT in Java
• Very cool book that dvelves deep into using XSLT with Java
• Showing it's age
• Not The Best Choice