Learning XSLT: A Hands-On Introduction to XSLT and XPath

Late one evening last week I was stuck needing to write some XSL code before an important deadline the next day. Having never written any XSL before, I turned to "Learning XSLT." After spending about two hours studying the excellent examples in the book, I was able to complete the stylesheet I needed which contains about 100 lines of code and 10 templates. I highly recommend the book to anyone needing to get up-to-speed quickly on XSLT.

While XSLT isn't a complex language, its declarative and template-based nature can make harder than expected to learn it, especially for people used to procedural languages. That's why a book like this, which provides a solid introduction to XSLT, may be more valuable than you would expect. The author manages to assemble an entry-level book without writing another useless "for dummies" guide. Fitzgerald filled the book with a huge amount of practical examples; you get plenty of code listings that often build on top of each other; incrementing the complexity along the way (an effective choice). In my opinion the writing style isn't always crystal clear and the author often introduce topics too early, briefly mentioning things that get a full explanation only a few chapters later. Notwithstanding this shortcoming, I think it's an excellent book that can really help getting started with XSLT. I would suggest to read it in a linear fashion, from beginning to the end in order to get the best out of it.

I know O'Reilly books are supposed to be more advanced than other offerings, but the O'Reilly "sub-series" Learning XYZ generally tends to take it a bit easier on beginners. This book really fails to be tutorial in nature and digresses into deeper subjects rather quickly. Not recommeded for beginners, so don't be fooled by the title inference.

The author seems to have no sympathy for the reader. Many statements are made that the author says he will explain later, and herein lies the weakness of the book. The author does not provide context for the introduction of new constructs. For example, in 2.2 "Literal Results Elements", he begins, "A literal result element is any XML element that is represented literally in a template, is not in the XSLT namespace, and is written literally onto the result tree when processed." I'm sure that may be an important point, but as introduced, I have no idea what problem, if any, this addresses. There is no context for the introduction of the construct and I can see no use for it at all. Would it take too much time explain how this is a tool I might be interested in? I want my money back.

Very good informaion

I used this book to learn XSLT while commuting back and forth on bus. I like O'Reilly books because they are fairly well edited and not expanded with useless verbiage to fill retail shelf space. This book generally fufills that expectation. I learned the XSLT and with DITA have now written thousands of lines of templates to create documentation production processes. My only complaint was that even when I read it, the book is XSLT 1.0 and dated as it only presents powerful XSLT 2.0 features in an appendix. Grouping, for instance, is supported by XSLT 2.0, and although solved in 1.0 is much simpler. That aside, the book is still useful as a fairly concise introduction. Much still applies, and one can find the 2.0 features documented in detail online. My single glaring complaint is that the author started the chapter on Conditional Processing by illustrating it with FORTRAN 77. Yikes! Anyone who knows FORTRAN 77 wouldn't need the explanation, and anyone who needs the explanation could only be confused by FORTRAN 77. (Same goes for the repetitive example on the same page using Java.) Fortunately, that is the only page in 352 that used programming languages as a didactic method. Experiment tried, experiment failed. The rest of the book is characterized by clear explanations for an otherwise educated user. I just might not spend a lot of time pondering 1.0 techniques, such as grouping, that are supported so well in XSLT 2.0, unless you need to work with a 1.0 processor.

Imagine you just bought a new car and stuck the keys in the ignition. Do you worry about every little minute detail of what's under the hood? Or do you just plant your foot down on the accelerator and drive? Learning XSLT is one of those books that has a strange "hiccup" feel to it. Reading this book is like putting your foot down on the accelerator, only to have a chicken cross in front of you to slam on the brakes and then accelerate again. Only then, having another chicken cross and yet again slam on the brakes. Tutorials are meant to be smooth, uninterrupted reading. Learning XSLT is an abrupt stop and go journey that resulted in it being tossed into the far back shelf of my personal library. For example, a really annoying feature in the book's layout are the icons and box comments. Frequently, they interrupt the flow causing switching of mental gears. Often too wordy, too detailed, and downright puzzling to why they even exist in the first place, they are anal and annoying. Surely the intricacies of QCNames, Code Points, Unicode, xml:lang attribute in every minute detail should have been removed out of this book. As an example of how poorly this book reads, I point to page 9. The section is "Using apply-templates". Two pages later of long winded overanalysis (and yet another interruption with a large box comment regarding Unicode), we end up with a trivial six line example using apply-templates. Boldfaced and detached away from the original point of discussion. By this time, the reader is flipping pages to go back to recall what the entire section was about. That is the general feel of this book - a lack of cohesiveness. After reading the first three chapters, I wondered where this book was heading. It read in scatter brained pieces and often too detailed for my liking - overly informative to be of any practical use. If you like getting bogged down in trivia minutiae, this is your book. The examples were poor and unfufilling; rarely showing a big picture example in a larger, useful, practical context. Most of the people who pick up this book will want to transform XML into XHTML - which this book fails to address in a dedicated chapter. Templates, the most important feature from a coding structure and development standpoint, is held off until Chapter 10. This should have been moved to earlier chapters, followed by discussion of axes, functions, XPATH, etc. Learning XSLT does not to a very good job of organizing content for understanding and instruction. It definitely failed to hold my attention. Out of all the O'Reilly books I have, this one was not very useful and needs a total rewrite!

The information is presented very dryly. The tone of the book is very taxing on the readers attention span. I find that one of the key tenets of these O'Reilly books is that they are usually very readable, and can be read front to back almost like a novel. I didn't find I was able to do this with Learning XSLT. Maybe it's the subject matter or maybe its the authors inability to hook the reader. Either way, it didn't work for me.

It is a comprehensive descrizione of xslt. Chapters are of the right size. Maybe it lacks of some features on Xslfo. Useful

I'm not a huge fan of O'Reilly books - I purchased this because it looked like the best of a bad bunch. To be fair, however, it is actually very good. The author explains things well enough and covers as much as one would need to know to reach an intermediate level with XSLT. It also provides information on versions other than 1.0 and the variety of XML/XSL processors out there. Although this book provides a guide of sorts for XML, it does get complex at times and it's easy to become lost in a sea of jargon - so I would advise that if you haven't already got some experience or knowledge of XML, then you should get a good book on the subject (John Shelley's How to use XML is excellent). The only fault I could attribute to this book is that the subject of namespaces, while present, is not covered in any great depth - but it's still a fine piece of work that I would recommend to anybody intending to be doing what it says on the cover.

I purchased this to help refresh my memory on xslt going into a new job role, it hasn't let me down, great guide, bible, tool

Il libro è datato ma trattandosi di xslt è ancora attuale, ottimo approccio alla spigazione dei concetti. valido per imparare in fretta la tecnologia.

This was required reading on my course last year. It's a fairly good introduction if you already have some familliarity with XML. Strangely in the first few chapters some simple concepts are presented in a quite confusing way. More complex examples later in the book are much easier to get to grips with. As the previous reviewer noted the examination of namespaces is superficial, unfortunate as this is an extremely important area. However, while not comprehensive enough to be a working reference it is a good beginning.