Rating:  - New source code available
Although I sympathize with the previous reviewers complaint about source code organization, this is partly due to the fact that more variations are included in the source distribution then the book itself. To remedy this issue a new source code zip file has been posted to the O'Reilly site that contains README files cross-referencing source code to book examples. I hope this creates a more pleasurable experience for my readers.
p.s. To avoid biasing the rating I gave myself the current 4 star rating although I humbly think most readers will have a 5 star experience!
Rating: - XSLT WITH A MAGNIFICENT TOUCH
The outlook of this "XSLT Cookbook" is refined: giving luxurious accommodation to experts, without scaring beginners away. Most of its 450 pages were dedicated to a sensible problem-solution-discussion pattern, (which readers should appreciate).
Apart from analyzing how to manipulate XML documents with Stylesheets, elaborate methods of using SVG and XSLT to plot graphs and charts were stressed. The otherwise tricky art of creating SOAP documentations from WSDL (using XSLT) was reduced to nursery rhymes.
I am satisfied by this author's method of tackling XSLT problems. Still, when the next edition of this book appears, I would expect to see a better job done: as regards all those precursors, which facilitate the processing of Visio documents in XSLT.
In conclusion, I would say that this is one of the few eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations books, which did not discriminate between beginners and advanced learners. All are welcomed! A great value indeed!
Rating:  - Poorly organized source code
One would think that such a code-heavy book would need decently organized source code to make it easy to follow along. Unfortunately I found this not to be the case.
Trying to relate examples in the book with the downloaded source has been truly an unpleasant experience.
For example, Chapter 2 shows an xml called numbers.xml which serves as input to most of the examples in the Chapter. Although there's a numbers.xml file it the directory source, it only contains about 10 lines, while the book example contains about 27 lines. But if you look in the Chapter 14 sample code directory, there is a numbers.xml file which corresponds to the sample in Chapter 2.
Rating:  - Round out your XSLT knowledge with this gem
I own both the XSLT Programmers Reference by M. Kay and XSLT by D. Tidwell. Both these books helped me learn XSLT; however, I am quite sure Mangano's book will help me master it. To be fair, I have only read the SVG chapter in detail but it provided such a treasure trove of immediately useful solutions that it alone was worth the price of the book. Sal Mangano writes in a no nonsense style that gets to the heart of what an XSLT user needs to know to get immediate results. However, far from just providing a grab bag of reusable code snippets, the XSLT Cookbook provides welcome insight in how to structure XSLT transformations.
My only complaint is that the code for the book was not yet available at the O'Reilly web site. However, as the book was just recently published I am hopeful it will be posted soon.
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