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Author/s : David Megginson
Publisher : Prentice Hall
Category : Other
Review by : Margarita Isayeva (Map)
Rating : 8 horseshoes</pre>
This book is about DTD. DTD isn't a new emerging and sexy technology, it's a technology on its decline as we watch it being superseded by XML Schema. So why read the book? I read it out of intellectual curiosity -- DTD is a kind of the "minimalist" game, where limited tools make creativeness a necessity. For more practical benefits, read this book if you need to write DTDs for documents designated for a human reader. If your XML is for computer consumptions, the book will be of less value. The same about those who just need a technical reference - it's not about how to write "correct" DTDs, it's about how to design "good" DTDs. What is considered good, a mental framework with key concepts of flexibility, extensibility, ease of learning/using/processing, is the most valuable part of the book. The author analyzes five industry-strandard DTDs (DocBook and HTML are best known) and illustrates his thesis on examples from those time-proven designs. How to translate virtues of "good design" into DTD declarations is explained in a simple manner and "goodness" is tracked down to almost measurable level.
In spite of two major limitations: part of information is unavoidably DTD-specific and all DTDs belong to publishing industry which makes the whole discussion document-oriented, a good deal of insights transcend this specifics and can be applied to Schema or any other notation - a proof that the book itself is well-designed. (Margarita Isayeva - Sheriff, August 2002)
More info at Amazon.com http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0136422993/javaranch rel="nofollow"> More info at Amazon.co.uk
