Amazon.co.uk
The opening chapters offer a brief introduction to XML and DTD (Document Type Definition) files and explain the basic concepts of parsing XML using event-driven or tree-based APIs. Next comes a long section on XML and Perl, covering the XML::Parser module, Perl and Unicode, generating and converting XML, and using SOAP or XML-RPC. A parallel section shows how the same things can be achieved with XML and Python, and there's a further chapter on Zope, the Python application server. PHP has a shorter section, focusing on XML parsing, working with RSS (Rich Site Summary) XML documents, and XML-RPC. The last part of the book offers a chapter each on four other scripting languages: REBOL, Ruby, Tcl, and AppleScript.
The snag with this book is that few developers work with all these languages, and covering so many limits the detail on any one. Even so, it is interesting to compare the differences between the various approaches, particularly between Perl and Python, which are the author's main area of expertise. There are also helpful insights on how to convert XML to and from database formats. --Tim Anderson, Amazon.co.uk
Book Description
-Complete coverage of the core XML processing issues, including the basics of parsing XML documents, converting XML to and from different formats and translating objects for use with databases.
-This book goes beyond the basics into advanced topics, such as using the SAX API for Perl, and using SOAP and XML-RPC to share XML formatted information over a network connection.
