Product DescriptionExtensible Markup Language (XML) has been perhaps the biggest buzzword in application development for several years and now Microsoft has taken XML into the core of its .NET Framework. This book is aimed at teaching XML (and related technologies such as XPath, XSLT, and XML Schema) to beginning and intermediate Visual Basic .NET developers who want to understand what all the fuss is about.
Over the course of the book readers will develop a good appreciation of not only what XML is, and how to handle it in Visual Basic .NET, but also how to use XML to build applications to run on a single desktop, single web server or distributed, multi-platform web services, in ways that have been extremely difficult to achieve with previous technologies.
To reinforce the core concepts, the book makes use of numerous individual examples along with two case studies. Firstly, there is an examination of how different XML based approaches can be used in the development of a contact application. The complexity of the project develops as the reader's knowledge increases through the book. Secondly, we dedicate a full chapter to describing the use of XML and a SQL Server database in the implementation of a web-based news portal.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Waste of $$
If I could give this book negative 100 stars, I would. I could say a lot, but a quote from page 235 about the XmlDocument class (not some ancillary class, mind you, a PRIMARY class for the topic) should sum it up: "There are some properties and methods we won't discuss here...so for specific information on these look at the MSDN documentation." WHAT!!!!!! That is only one of several times the reader is instructed to use MSDN, as if we all hadn't been there before we got this book. I might understand ... Read More
Rating: - Could have been a great book
I am only on chapter 3 and have actually enjoyed the subject up to this point but I don't believe I have ever read a techbook with so many gross mistakes. For example, page 76 states "ANSI does use a BOM" when in fact it should have said "ANSI does not use a BOM" which is easily concluded from prior text. Also, the very first code example in ADO is horribly written. One gets the impression after awhile that this is the rough first draft of the actual intended book. Wrox doesn't even list this book as ... Read More
Rating: - Poor content structure, very poor code samples
The point for a beginner's book is to layout concepts clearly and to make their application evident through clear and COMPLETE examples. The examples in this book are fragmented and there is no proper reference to portions of code that are key to program segments working. I have been programming for 10 years and I cannot follow the struture and examples clearly. Bottom line, there is poor content structure, very poor code samples and poor explaination of concepts, especially for a beginner's book but ... Read More
Rating: - Good practical book
Showed some good practical examples. Maybe not enough to learn XML technolgies on its own, but it showsed how they can be used in .Net which was good.
Rating: - Not very organized
This must be my most disappointing WROX book so far:
- The authors haven't done a very good job of integrating their texts. It is sometimes very obvious that different persons wrote parts of the same chapter. Some information is repeated unnecessarily, other information is omitted.
- Like the other reviewer said, sometimes the title of a chapter doesn't cover the content very well. Also, some XML standards aren't explained very well, and text seems to go on forever, instead of ... Read More
- Waste of $$
- Good practical book
- Not very organized
