Rating:  - Great book for people who know XSLT
Some other reviews have said that this is not a book for beginners, which is true. You need to understand the mechanics of XSLT first to get the most out of the book. That's not the real value, however. This book is great because it shows you how to write XSLT well. This is a value that a simple reference will not provide.
Rating: - Great book for all levels
Probably one of the best XSLT books--at least, that I have seen. Well-suited for all user levels...top-end topics include SOAP, WSDL, and SVG. An indispensable resource for the XML developer.
Rating:  - not for beginners
This is not a book for beginners. Not for beginning programmers, and not for advanced programmers who don't know much about XSLT. An introductory chapter or two explaining XSLT, and maybe a few really simple examples (10-20 lines each), would have gone a long way towards making this book more useful. If you already know XSLT pretty well, though, this could provide some useful sample code.
Rating: - XSLT anyone?
If ever there were a publishing company that could make XML-XSL easier to understand it's O'Reilly. Being somewhat new to the concept of XML transformations this book proved fairly intuitive, although I would recommend purchasing this book as a chaser to one that is a bit more elementary if you're just starting out.
There are plenty of good working examples with detailed instruction and code. O'Reilly also provided the CD, which, as always, was a tremendous help for implementing some ideas we got from their code into our environment.
The authors also provided hands-on reference for creating solutions in the XML-XSL Transformation domain. It covers areas from simple string operations to SVG generation to extending XSLT with Perl, JavaScript and Java.
Overall, I do recommend this book, but as I said before this is really not the book to get if you don't know what XSLT is.
Rating: - Get your XSLT solutions here!
XSLT Cookbook presents specific solutions to situations you come across when using XSLT. While the book can help solve an immediate problem it can also be used as an intermediate or advanced level text to get a better understanding of XSLT and how to write stylesheets.
There are fourteen chapters dealing with topics such as Strings, Dates and Numbers, Selecting and Traversing, XML to HTML, Code Generation, and Testing and Debugging. Each problem has a short problem statement, a solution, and a discussion of the solution. The solution discussions often describe alternates and why they were not selected as the preferred solution.
I have not read the entire book yet but picked chapters that were of interest to me. The Selecting and Traversing and Testing and Debugging chapters contain approaches I could use right away. The Generic and Functional Programming chapter was very interesting and I wish this book had been available in mid-2002 when I was doing code generation work with XSLT. Good stuff in every chapter I have read!
This is a book that most, if not all, XSLT developers should have. For beginners it provides concrete examples of how to use XSLT. For more advanced developers it provides a good reference for solving that problem you are trying to solve.
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