RE: [xsl] Books on XSLT/XPATH

Subject: RE: [xsl] Books on XSLT/XPATH
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:05:05 -0500
At 12:08 PM 2/17/2007, Michael Kay wrote:
I'm in the very early stages of discussion with Wiley about doing a revised
edition of the books to fix the few areas where the final specs have
diverged. Don't hold your breath.

Mike, if the word went out that a new updated and corrected edition, with better indexes, page headers and navigation aids, were due out Any Day Now (and so one might not want to buy the old one), do you suppose this might motivate the publisher to accelerate its production?


Of course I'm kidding, but I couldn't agree more that the next edition should be easier to look things up in. It's a "Programmer's Reference", after all. In my own case, I only use the books when I get *really stuck* and resources on the net are failing me -- mainly because they're so hard to find things in, since I know the stuff is there. (I may not be your typical user, but there you have it.)

For beginners, I still very much recommend Evan Lenz's little "XSLT 1.0 Pocket Reference" from O'Reilly (as well as Jeni Tennison's introductory treatment, already mentioned). It only covers XSLT 1.0, but it's got an excellent concise writeup of the XSLT processing model, which still applies to 2.0, and that's the place where beginners are most prone to getting stuck. You can start working with 2.0 right away with this book, understanding only that when things get hard, you can also look elsewhere since XSLT 2.0 almost certainly has a way to help. Master what's in its 172 pages and you'll gain quite a command of the language, in either version.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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