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XSLT Quickly Review by Margarita Isayeva
One of my favorite XSLT books
This book, as the author himself put it, provides "task-oriented explanations of how to get work done with XSLT". I would define the audience that will benefit most as intermediate XSLT developers - you are expected to have some knowledge of XML and XSLT. Part 1 has a brief tutorial, yet too brief for a complete novice. Part 2 is what makes this book worth reading - it delves into typical tasks XSLT developers encounter: adding, changing, deleting elements and attributes, sorting, avoiding duplicates and many other. Perhaps, the book was planned as a "cookbook" to quickly look up "how do I...", but it is more than that: the author describes how things work in detail, shows the best way to perform a task, warns about subtle issues you would spend hours fighting with on your own. I found the explanations very useful: even reading about basic concepts can bring discoveries. There are more advanced topics too, like dealing with namespaces or recursive techniques; read about them, and more challenging tasks will not catch you unprepared.
The book doesn't touch on really advanced concepts like the famous Muenchian grouping, but this is probably outside of XSLT's everyday repertoire and, therefore, outside of this book's mission.
I found myself referring to this book often in JavaRanch's XML forum. Just recently when solving RSS namespace mystery, I posted a part of the stylesheet that prints namespaces (p.99) and here is the response: "That diagnostic transform is worth its weight in gold!"
And I am neither the author nor a member of his family.