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XML Hacks

100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools

Review from Bill Coan

by Michael Fitzgerald

Published by O’Reilly http://www.oreilly.com/

ISBN: 0596007116                  460 pp.

Published July 2004                Price: $US24.95

Until recently, you could read at random a dozen books on XML and never stumble across a reference to Microsoft Office. The release of Office 2003 changed all that. (Prior to Office 2003, only Excel XP and Access XP had very limited XML capabilities. Word XP had none.)

Office 2003 is not the primary focus of Michael Fitzgerald’s impressive new book on XML hacks. Indeed, only five out of the book’s 100 hacks deal with Office 2003 applications and only one of them deals with Microsoft Word. Even so, XML Hacks is a book that will be of interest to Word or Office users who develop a serious interest in XML.

The book exhibits an infectious enthusiasm for the power and flexibility of XML, yet manages to maintain a concise, easy-to-read, matter-of-fact style that makes XML seem very, very approachable. Best of all, the book is entirely devoted to accomplishment of tasks of great utility. I can't remember when (if ever) I last saw a handier, more practical book. Everything about it seems well-conceived and purposeful.

The range of hacks is quite broad. Some of them are actually mini-introductions or mini-tutorials, which means that a user with essentially no background in XML can pick up the book and benefit from it, provided such a user starts at the beginning and proceeds in a fairly orderly fashion to the end. Users with a stronger background in XML can jump into the text at any point and find a brief description of each hack, followed by a brief discussion of the concepts and tools involved, followed in turn by a clear set of steps for carrying out the hack.

Entry level hacks include reading the code inside an XML document or viewing an XML document in a browser. Intermediate hacks include working with XML documents using a variety of tools (including freeware and shareware tools but also including Word and Excel and Access), plus understanding namespaces, schemas, and stylesheets. Advanced hacks include converting non-XML files to XML, transforming XML data from one schema to another, creating books, doing math, defining XML vocabularies with schemas, and creating RSS feeds.

The book includes hacks from 18 different contributors, almost all of whom have very impressive backgrounds in XML. Michael Fitzgerald has somehow managed to impose a uniform structure and highly readable style on all of the hacks and provided extensive references to additional resources for each one.

If you’re completely new to XML or if your interest in XML is limited to the support for XML built into Microsoft Office 2003, then pick up some other book first. After you’ve grasped the fundamentals and you’re ready to explore XML in all of its glory, then you’ll be ready for XML Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools.