XSLT Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for XML and XSLT Developers

by Sal Mangano

Book Overview

Forget those funky robot toys that were all the rage in the '80s, XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Transformations) is the ultimate transformer. This powerful language is expert at transforming XML documents into PDF files, HTML documents, JPEG files--virtually anything your heart desires. As useful as XSLT is, though, most people have a difficult time learning its many peculiarities. And now Version 2.0, while elegant and powerful, has only added to the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596009747
• ISBN13: 9780596009748
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 774 Pages
• Weight: 2.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Lots of "R & D" material here...

[Review of 2nd edition] One of my favorite development methodologies is "R & D"... "Rob & Duplicate". And an important source of inspiration is often the O'Reilly Cookbook series. For XSLT, you now have an up-to-date wealth of samples to pull from... XSLT Cookbook (2nd Edition) by Sal Mangano. Contents: XPath; Strings; Numbers and Math; Dates and Times; Selecting and Traversing; Exploiting XSLT 2.0; XML to Text; XML to XML; Querying XML; XML to HTML; XML to SVG; Code Generation; Vertical XSLT Application Recipes; Extending and Embedding XSLT; Testing and Debugging; Generic and Functional Programming; Index If you've never seen an O'Reilly Cookbook, the concept is pretty simple. Each "recipe" consists of a problem description, a solution, and a discussion of how the solution addresses the issues, along with any observations that can shed light on the situation. These recipes are then grouped together by general problem types so that you can easily find an area that might offer up a quick answer to your particular problem. In this book, Mangano expands upon the 1st edition that covered XSLT 1.0. The 2nd edition now covers the updated XSLT 2.0 standard, and offers up both 1.0 and 2.0 solutions and discussions to many of the problems. As such, you will find value in the material regardless of your particular version usage. So for instance, let's say I have an XML file that needs to be reformatted into a second file to meet some formatting requirement. By checking into the XML to XML file, I'll find solutions on turning attributes into elements, elements to attributes, renaming elements and attributes, and so on. Tutorial books will teach you the syntax for doing stuff like this, but they can't anticipate real-world solutions. Cookbooks assume you already know what you're doing, and they go right to solutions. Personally, I find a number of uses for books like this. There's the obvious, which is to find an exact (or nearly so) answer to your particular problem. But stepping away from the "immediate" need, there's always the opportunity to read through the recipes and see how others might code a solution. You can learn new coding techniques that way, as well as see features of the language that perhaps you never noticed before. Sort of like having a guru sitting next to you at work... Assuming you're past the point of beginner, the XSLT Cookbook is probably the second XSLT book that you want to have on your bookshelf. If it helps you solve a couple of problems and save a handful of hours in the process, it'll more than pay for itself...

Great book for people who know XSLT

Some other reviews have said that this is not a book for beginners, which is true. You need to understand the mechanics of XSLT first to get the most out of the book. That's not the real value, however. This book is great because it shows you how to write XSLT well. This is a value that a simple reference will not provide.

Great reference for XSLT solutions

The XSLT Cookbook offers more than one hundred code solutions to common XSLT problems. The covered topics range from string operations, handling dates and numbers to converting xml to various formats, like text, HTML or SVG. The author also included some speciality solutions for working with Visio and Excel documents or generating XTM Topic Maps. The last chapters of the book cover some more advanced topic, like extending XSLT and testing stylesheets. As it is a Cookbook, the beef of this book are the code examples. All examples I tested so far are of outstanding quality and work great. For the most problems you will encounter when writing stylesheets, this book offers an example. Just look it up and you are there.The very high quality of this book and it's code examples is impressive. The author Sal Mangano sure put a lot of work and research into this book. And the expertise of Jeni Tennison, as technical reviewer, and Simon St.Laurent, as editor, sure were an important factor in achieving this quality standard.If you are an absolute beginner, you probably should start with a more tutorial style book, but as soon as you have some basic knowledge of XSLT, this book is a great reference for XSLT solutions.

Good XSLT reference for non-beginners

The book is an excellent practical hands-on reference for creating solutions in the XML-XSL Transformation domain. It covers areas from simple string operations to SVG generation to extending XSLT with Perl, JavaScript and Java. The author Sal Mangano has good working examples with detailed descriptions of the code. This makes experimenting with new code relatively painless. Being an experienced XSLT developer I found the book easy to follow. However people new to the concept of XML transformations would do well to get a basic understanding of the matter before diving into building solutions using this book. Having a copy of the XSLT Cookbook during the development phase of the LCRA.org website project would have reduced the time needed to craft a good sustainable solution, and reduced the amount of code I had to redesign to be modular and flexible. An example is the recommendation : "Prefer 'selecting' and 'matching' over 'filtering'" pg 114, para 3. This allows for flexible XML schemas. A companion CD with working example code and a searchable text of the book on the CD would have been appreciated. The website at Oreilly does have a downloadable zip file of the examples. All in all well worth the $40.00 price of the book,Neeraj

Round out your XSLT knowledge with this gem

I own both the XSLT Programmers Reference by M. Kay and XSLT by D. Tidwell. Both these books helped me learn XSLT; however, I am quite sure Mangano's book will help me master it. To be fair, I have only read the SVG chapter in detail but it provided such a treasure trove of immediately useful solutions that it alone was worth the price of the book. Sal Mangano writes in a no nonsense style that gets to the heart of what an XSLT user needs to know to get immediate results. However, far from just providing a grab bag of reusable code snippets, the XSLT Cookbook provides welcome insight in how to structure XSLT transformations. My only complaint is that the code for the book was not yet available at the O'Reilly web site. However, as the book was just recently published I am hopeful it will be posted soon.