I was gifted this book and I am reading it. I am about half the way and I'd like to note down my first impressions here.

It's surely a good book, even with the typos and contraddictions that jeffa pointed out. But I found one more contraddiction that I would like to stress.

There are points where the authors get a bit pedantic, trying to clearify things that are already clear.

Let's see an example: in chapter 5, "SAX", section "External Entity Resolution" the authors give an example of a book written in XML that was split in four files; these files were pulled in an XML file via four external entities. Since a filter that was showed before resolved this kind of entity, filtering this file would result in the whole book as output. They say:

The previous filter example would resolve the external entity references for you diligently and output the entire book in one piece. Your file separation scheme would be lost and you'd have to edit the resulting file to break it back into multiple files. Fortunately, we can override the resolution of external entity references using a handler called resolve_entity

I feel that the phrase Your file separation...multiple files adds nothing to the concept expressed; worse: it makes the book more boring and hard to read. And I found a lot of these (I am at page 99 now...)

Again, it's a good book, but I feel that it would benefit of a revision in the language to make it more direct. That could make the book slimmer, but personally I don't care about the thickness more than I care about the content.

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz

In reply to Re: Perl & XML by bronto
in thread Perl & XML by jeffa

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