XML enjoys an increasing popularity and so does XSLT - a high-level language for transforming XML documents, designed to make your work with XML more productive.
This book, as the author put it, provides "task-oriented explanations of how to get work done with XSLT". I would define the audience that will benefit most as intermediate XSLT developers - you are expected to have some knowledge of XML and XSLT. Part 1 has a brief tutorial, but it is not the strongest part of this book. Part 2 is what makes this book worth the read - it delves into most typical tasks, or even classes of tasks, XSLT developers encounter: adding, changing, deleting elements and attributes, sorting, avoiding duplicates and many other. Perhaps, the book was planned as a "cookbook" to quickly look up "how do I...", but it is more than that: the author describes how things work in detail, shows the best way to perform a task, warns about subtle issues you would spend hours fighting with on your own. I found the explanations very useful: even reading about basic concepts can bring discoveries. There are more advanced topics too, like dealing with namespaces or recursive techniques; read about them, and more challenging tasks will not catch you unprepared.
The book doesn't touch on really advanced concepts like the famous Muench's grouping, but this is probably outside of XSLT's everyday repertoire and, therefore, outside of this book's mission.
(Margarita Isayeva - Bartender, July 2001)
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