Useful tips for every XML task you're likely to want to do

This is my favorite O'Reilly book. The scope covers everything you can imagine for working with XML. I really like the depth of information in every hack ('hack' in the sense of ways to get something done). Whenever a tool is mentioned, there is often additional info about related tools that do similar functionality and why you would choose one or the other. Each hack is like a well-crafted short story.

At first I glanced through the book. It's amazing how people have solved so many common tasks to make working with XML automated and flexible. It's fun to look at the titles of each hack and see the illustrations. I found myself saying "That's a technique that'll come in handy someday."

Then I found myself marking up the tools and applications mentioned that did nifty things that will be good quivers in my XML toolkit.

Finally this book provided some invaluable techniques when I needed to do a few one-time XML tasks. I needed to extract information from a humongous XML file. I was able to extract the text of all elements into a nice tidy HTML page.

Another time I created a tree diagram with custom bullet list symbols for the two types of items in the tree using CSS to format the XML (I'd heard it was possible, but didn't know how to do it).

And if you're looking for a quick explanation and examples for some XML technology, like XQuery, XSLT, SVG, XPointer, XLINK, RSS, some recommendations on commercial and free XML tools, XForms, XHTML, working with Microsoft Office documents as XML or for importing into Word or Excel and many more, then I recommend getting this useful, information-packed and handy reference book.

You'll grab it off the shelf whenever you want to do something efficiently in XML without reinventing the wheel.

Other Reviews

• Great Overview of XML
• Useful tips for every XML task you're likely to want to do
• helpful supplement
• Do [Task] with [Other Object]
• 100 Cool Hints and Tips