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XML and Perl
XML and Perl is written by two well-known members of the Perl XML community. Both are frequent contributors to the "perl-xml" mailing list, so there's certainly no doubt that they know what they are talking about. Which is always a good thing in a technical book.
The book is made up of five sections. The first section has a couple of chapters which introduce you to the concepts covered in the book. Chapter one introduces you separately to XML and Perl and then chapter two takes a first look at how you can use Perl to process XML. This chapter finishes with two example programs for parsing simple XML documents.
Section two goes into a lot more detail about parsing XML documents with Perl. Chapter three looks at event-driven parsing using XML::Parser and XML::Parser::PerlSAX to demonstrate to build example programs before going to talk in some detail about XML::SAX which is currently the state of the art in event-driven XML parsing in Perl. It also looks at XML::Xerces which is a Perl interface to the Apache Software Foundation's Xerces parser. Chapter four covers tree based XML parsing and presents examples using XML::Simple, XML::Twig, XML::DOM and XML::LibXML. In both of these chapters the pros and cons of each of the modules are discussed in detail so that you can easily decide which solution to use in any given situation.
Section three covers generating XML documents. In chapter five we look at generating XML from text sources using simple print statements and also the modules XML::Writer and XML::Handler::YAWriter. Chapter six looks at taking data from a database and turning that into XML using modules like XML::Generator::DBI and XML::DBMS. Chapter seven looks at miscellaneous other input formats and contains examples using XML::SAXDriver::CSV and XML::SAXDriver::Excel.
Section four covers more advanced topics. Chapter eight is about XML transformations and filtering. This chapter covers using XSLT to transform XML documents. It covers the modules XML::LibXSLT, XML::Sabletron and XML::XPath.
Chapter nine goes into detail about Matt Sergeant's AxKit, the Apache XML Kit which allows you to create a website in XML and automatically deliver it to your visitors in the correct format.
Chapter ten rounds off the book with a look at using Perl to create web services. It looks at the two most common modules for creating web services in Perl - XML::RPC and SOAP::Lite.
Finally, section five contains the appendices which provide more background on the introductions to XML and Perl from chapter one.
There was one small point that I found a little annoying when reading the book: Each example was accompanied with a sample of the XML documents to be processed together with both a DTD and an XML Schema definition for the document. This seemed to me to be overkill. Did we really need both DTDs and XML Schemas for every example. I would have found it less distracting if one (or even both) of these had been moved to an appendix.
That small complaint aside, I found it a useful and interesting book. It will be very useful to Perl programmers (like myself) who will increasingly be expected to process (and provide) data in XML formats.
You can purchase XML and Perl from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The whole point of XML is that it is NOT just a string of text. That's why Perl isn't particularly any better than Java or C++ or VB or whatever for processing XML - you're going to be using a library that gives you SAX or DOM access to your XML, and you'll never need to know that there's a text representation being serialized onto some wires somewhere.
How effective were the examples? How easy to read and understand were the general concepts? Were the descriptions of libraries and API's clear? Was the writing generally readable?
Would this book even make a good reference?
Jeez, anyone want to follow up the post with a real review?
Ah no, see, you forgot to read the first line:
"One of Perl's great strengths is in processing text files."
Perl is good at handling text files. XML is a text file. Therefore, Perl is good at handling XML.
As opposed to:
My pasta maker is good at making pasta. Pasta is a type of food. Ice-cream is also food. Therefore, my pasta maker is good at making ice-cream.
Does that help?
Score:-1, Funny
A what? You (or rather the brilliant person being quoted) either mean that it matches a string that the expression isn't supposed to, which would be a serious bug in the language (and I am not aware of any such bugs); or you mean that it matches correctly, but matches things you didn't expect it to, in which case you tell, by (gasp!) testing your code. In any case, how do you tell a "false positive" regexp match in Java?
but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program that becomes an asset to both you and your employer
Perhaps you can't. I have, and I do.
sic transit gloria mundi
I see the table of contents explained in paragraph form. And then one complaint about the organization of the book. And then I expect to read the review, but it's already on to "you can buy this book here", and user comments.
I know complaining about slashdot stories is like shooting those proverbial barreled fish, but sheesh.
Except that your syllogism is faulty, whereas his is not.
His:
1. (from earlier in his post) Perl is well suited for processing all text formats.
2. XML is a text format.
3. Therefore, Perl is well suited for processing XML.
Yours:
1. Your pasta maker is good at making pasta.
2. Pasta is a type of food.
3. Therefore, your pasta maker is good at making all types of food (for example, ice cream).
You can see that he went from general to specific, whereas you went from specific to general. He argues that being able to do all things in a given set (process all text formats) gives the ability to do one of the things in that set (process a particular text format). You argue that being able to do one thing in a set (make a particular food) gives the ability to do all things in the set (make all foods).
You could save your argument by changing your middle point to be "All foods are a type of pasta," and then your conclusion becomes trivially true. But you'd also have to get everyone to agree that ice cream is pasta.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.