I was very impressed by chapters 6 and 7 (although HTML stuff isn't really accurate - for example, A&B isn't the same as A&B in SGML since an SGML parser will look for a B entity in the first case) but very disappointed by chapters 8, 9, 19 and 20 (at least ; chapters 10 to 13 aren't error-prone).
The author doesn't distinguish XPath expressions, used to select nodes, and XSLT patterns, used to match already selected nodes. Although both have a very similar syntax, they have completely different semantics. He also seems convinced that location paths are either totally abbreviated or unabbreviated whereas abbreviated syntax applies to location steps, so you may have abbreviated and unabbreviated location steps in the same location path. For all that he doesn't use unabbreviated steps in unabbreviated paths' predicates.
I'm the French translator for the second part of the book (and related reference chapters) and need to fix and tidy all th!
at mess, spending out a huge amount of time. At least French customers will have an accurate book.
I posted several serious errata and haven't received any acknowledgement or else, and all these errata have falled in the "unconfirmed" list whereas they're all confirmed by official documents. What are the authors doing?
For years, O'Reilly's books were synonymous of quality and technical accuracy. This feeling has changed during last month and I'll never buy an O'Reilly's book with my eyes shut any more.
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