Book review: Effective XML

I liked this book. Main focus isn’t on all the standards and framework there is but more on how to use the language as it stands. There’s Do’s and Don’ts such as Using namespaces for modularity byt not using namespace prefixes in Element Content and attribute values.

I would not recommend this book in the reference library more for reading through in one sweep and then maybe come back to certain parts when needed.

The atmosphere in the book is nice. It’s written in a conversational way without getting too informal. Here’s an example of a good chapter (Item 29 Always Use a Parser)

XML documents are just too rich in syntax sugar to be processed by anything short of a full-blown XML parser. I’ve seen many hackish systems held together by string and bailing wire based on regular expressions, grep, sed, raw stream processing, and other tools. These are extremely brittle and rarely able to handle the full panoply of documents they encounter.