Title: Java XML Programming with Servlets and JSP
Authors: Alexander Nakhimovsky and Tom Myers
ISBN: 1-861002-85-8
Retail: $49.95
XML is pretty hot these days. Walk into the computer section of your local bookstore
and you are likely to see a couple dozen or more books on XML alone.
The book Java XML Programming, published by Wrox is one of the few XML books I have found
which focuses on using Java to do XML development. Up until now many of the XML books I have
looked at only explain the basic syntax of XML and how to create XML documents. Few books
actually show you how to manipulate XML data. Finally a book that actually teaches me how to use this stuff!
This book is pretty thick with over 700 pages of content. Despite the books' title it doesn't
even touch on using XML until chapter 5. This however shouldn't discourage you from taking a serious
look at this book. The first four chapters provide a lot of useful information covering the fundamentals
of n-tier architecture and introducing some basics of Servlets and JDBC.
Chapter 4, Languages, Grammars and Parsers is one of the highlights of this book. It does
an excellent job of explaining from start to finish how to define your own programming language using EBNF (Extended Backus Naur Format). If you
haven't ever used EBNF, or worked with tools like Lex and Yacc, then this chapter will be an insightful look into just how
programming languages are developed. Later in the book the author describes how a programming language can be defined using XML.
Chapters 5 through 9 are the meat of this book. Starting with the basics of XML syntax this book goes on further
to explain DTD usage, differences between SAX and DOM, and finally writing your own mini-language using XML. One aspect I found particularly refreshing about
the code samples in these chapters is that they are not dependent on any third party classes. This alone makes the book a reference I can
frequently refer to without fear of having code samples be invalid due to deprecated classes and or methods.
Another great section of this book is chapter 13, XSLT and XPath. If you are unfamiliar with XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformation), it is a
way of converting an XML document into another document format (i.e. HTML, WML) using an XSLT stylesheet. If you are at all familiar with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) then
you are half way there, XSLT is to XML as CSS is to HTML.
The rest of the book puts your newfound knowledge of XML to use, focusing primarily on developing n-tier applications
using XML and Servlets/JSP. Several real-world code examples are provided making this book an excellent resource for those
readers who best learn by example.
Overall I would give this book a high rating. If you are seriously considering doing some Java based XML development then
I would highly recommend adding this one to your bookshelf.
Click here for Book Excerpts
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