This book is unrelentingly practical. This is both its main advantage and its biggest drawback.
The book describes, in great detail, how to build and set up an XML-driven e-commerce web site using a single case study. Each of the concepts covered (XML, DTD, Catalog, Shopping Cart, Look and Feel, Surveys, Payment Processing, News feeds etc.) gets a few pages of introduction and a chapter of annotated code. The advantage of this approach is that the reader is never left with hanging questions about just how to implement something - every bracket and semicolon is there.
The disadvantage is that hardly any coverage is given to alternative approaches.
EJB and XSLT get a few pages, HTML templating gets just one line! The code examples are solid, but seem a little "old fashioned"; there's no use of the Collections API, JDOM or XSLT, for example. Don't let any of this discourage you though - consider these points as options for further study. The code is all on the supplied CD, and you are free to tinker with it.
If you are a programmer and unsure what all the e-commerce handwaving really means, or you need to produce a basic e-commerce system in a hurry, you need this book.
(Frank Carver - Sheriff, June 2001)
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk More info at FatBrain.com
[This message has been edited by Johannes de Jong (edited June 24, 2001).]
