Probably twice as much about XML Schemas, than you ever hoped to know
The first six chapters provide a detailed tutorial. Grumble: rules are stated rather than explained and the questions I had prior to reading are still ... questions. Six more chapters immerse you into schema design issues. They lead through all phases of schema design, from abstract data modeling with UML to specificity of writing schemas for document-centric and data-centric XML instances. In passing you will get a pack of insightful ideas, like how wisdom of venerable relational data model can be applied to schemas... Considering very immature state, schemas design is in, the authors did an amazing job, more than was possible!
Three last assorted chapters are my favorite. "Schema and XSLT" shows how generic XSLT stylesheet can work against a special kind of XML documents - schemas; for example, how to automatically transform schemas into HTML forms for representing XML data instance. "Schematron and Other Schema Technologies" is devoted to alternative Schema languages, most notably Schematron, which provides rich tools for data validation and can greatly liberate your application from a data validation task. The last chapter, "Schema-Based Programming" presents an innovative view of schemas as a base of declarative programming, where schemas carry the description on the whole application, not only its data, but also user interface and even logic/behavior. As a whole, these three chapters prove that schemas only begin to exhibit their potential and this is where your original ideas may flourish.
(Margarita Isayeva - Bartender, September 2001)
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk More info at FatBrain.com
