Re: [xml-dev] xml, books

[Dennis Sosnoski <dms@sosnoski.com>]

Simon St.Laurent wrote:

>...A few XML Schema books have done adequately, but a lot
>have disappeared.  Web Services books have fared especially badly.  Even
>books on hiding XML behind other technologies, like O'Reilly's _Java &
>XML Data Binding_, haven't really caught on.
>
>  
>
To me it seems like there was a mini-boom in technical books following
on the heels of the .com crash. Publishers and/or authors seemed to want
to rush out books on the latest buzzword whether there was material of
sufficient quality and quantity to justify a book or not. This appeared
to be the case with many of the books on Web services, and I think
especially fits the _Java & XML Data Binding_ book you mentioned - not
much substance, and what substance it has was out of date by the time it
hit print.

I don't know how the individual Web service books are faring, but I'd
suspect that those which focus on implementing solutions using a
particular technology are doing better than the "architecture" books
that seem so common. Unfortunately the Web service area is still
evolving rapidly and the current generation technologies aren't
necessarily the best choices looking at where things are headed a year
down the road (Apache Axis is a great example of this, IMHO - good
usability for rpc/encoded, horrible for doc/lit, with doc/lit the clear
choice for the future).

That ignores the MS world, where technology choices are generally much
more restricted than for Java. Which is actually not a slam at MS -
restricting choices can have positive benefits in terms of making things
work together (as witness the WS-I BP work). Of course, I prefer
choice... :-)

   - Dennis