O'Reilly Media | XSLT Review

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Book:		XSLT
Subject:		XSLT Review
Date:		2002-05-09 06:14:00
From:		Neil Milne

Rating: Reasonably good, but very focused towards transforming XML for HTML targets. I was new to XSLT and found that the numerous mistakes in the example stylesheets a bit confusing and annoying, and spent some time scratching my head over what the second grouping example was doing (until realizing that the first sorted for-each contains superfluous sorts from first and last name, which can be removed since the second and third example [using id's] appear functionaly identical - they both select sorted 'zip' code elements and then sort a selected subsets of the data by name, they just do it slightly differently). The XSLT reference in the back is quite handy, but I'd perhaps recommend another primer if you want to do XML->XML translation, as many of the functions you'd use aren't explored in the tutorial-like section of the book. For example, the copy and copy-of elements aren't talked about at all until the dry reference section! Based on some of the feedback about the XML technology O'Reilly books in general it sounds like they could do with some more thorough newbie and peer proof reading...