Book review: "Beginning XML with DOM and AJAX"

"Beginning XML with DOM and AJAX"
By Sas Jacobs, published by APress

The book is an excellent introduction into XML, what in today's world of distributed, multi-platform applications development, is an unavoidable and critical technology. An essential amount of foundation is provided on the basics of XML and XHTML (DTDs schema, structuring rules, web vocabularies, etc.), it also delves into CSS, DOM scripting, remoting via XMLHTTP for AJAX interfaces, server-side XML in ASP.NET 2.0 and PHP, and using XML in Flash applications. Each chapter has a good amount of web-based resources to check out. Even experienced developers will find something useful in this book.

Author Sas Jacobs features a great discussion about using some of the lesser-known niche features of CSS with XML, and provides healthy, practical examples you can replicate or download and instantly implement in your own web projects.

My favorite chapter, and the one I've broke the spine on for my own copy, is Chapter 7 – "Advanced Client-Side XSLT Techniques". There you'll find the necessary information for building sophisticated (if not universally supported by all browsers) web UIs through integrated transformations. This includes demonstrating how to use extension functions/objects, generating JavaScript through XSLT, and dynamic client-side sorting. Most of these are MSIE-dependent, but the chapter also takes into consideration proper testing for graceful degradation in Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, etc. For similar reasons, I likewise got a lot out of the "DOM Scripting" discussion.

In criticism, I would have liked the chapter on XSLT - in my opinion the section most people reading this book will need the most - to be longer. It's rather rudimentary even and doesn't cover some of the more time-saving features of XSLT. Also, I found the "Web Vocabularies" to be extraneous; interesting but not warranting an entire chapter in today's WWW. The book would also benefit from an appendix of the resources mentioned for various tools, URLs and technologies available to speed XML-related development.

But beyond these minor concerns, which I'm sure will be modified in forthcoming revised versions, the book remains a must-have resource for introductory programming, and a useful tool for more intermediate developers.

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