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I'm pleased to announce that the second edition of XML in a Nutshell has
been released and can now be found at fine computer bookstores
everywhere including Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
For those of you who've read and enjoyed the first edition,
the obvious question is what's new? and is it worth shelling out another
$30 to update? The latter question may depend on your pocketbook and
just how dog-eared your copy of the first edition is, but I can tell you
what's new.
The single biggest addition since the first edition is complete coverage
of the W3C XML Schema language. Scott wrote a tutorial chapter and I wrote a
reference chapter that together cover every last element and attribute
in the language. Jeni Tennison did an excellent tech review of those
chapters, and taught us many things about the schema spec that were far
from obvious. I think the result is the most complete and accurate
reference to the W3C XML Schema Language you'll find anywhere. I also
wrote a new chapter about RDDL, the Resource Directory Description
Language, an XML application based on modular XHTML that can be used for
XML documents placed at the end of namespace URIs.
The remainder of the book is very similar to the first edition in
overall structure and layout. However, we did rewrite every chapter to
bring it up to date with the state of the art of XML in 2002. In the
process, we added a lot of new and updated content to the existing
chapters including:
* SAX filters
* JAXP, the Java API for XML Processing
* TrAX, the Transformations API for XML
* Unicode 3.1
* XLink 1.0
* XPointer, 2nd candidate recommendation
* XSL Formatting Objects 1.0
Of course, we also corrected any mistakes we found along the way, or
that had been pointed out to us by readers of the first edition. This
includes the infamous bug on p. 35 that replaced ?, *, and + with *, *,
and *. (FYI, I have no idea how that slipped in originally. Scott went
through the drafts of the first edition and verified that it was correct
right up through the final page proofs. Somewhere between the page
proofs and the printer, the ? and + got changed asterisks.) Overall,
though, I think the first edition was a pretty good book and this one's
even better. If you're working with schemas, then I think you'll want a
copy of the second edition immediately. If not, you may be able to hold
out until the pages start falling out of the first edition (which may
take awhile, O'Reilly uses pretty durable binding.)
The second edition of XML in a Nutshell is $39.95 and is now or soon
will be available at bookstores everywhere. O'Reilly and Cafe con
Leche both have various additional information about the book for
those who are interested:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/xmlnut2/
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|
