Reviews for XSLT Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

1. Very good book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, October 12th, 2009

   This is a very good book. All the arguments are explained well and with a lot of source code that helps a lot understanding the way it works.

2. Don't believe everything the title suggests

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2007

   This is easily the weakest cookbook series book I have bought.
   
   I'm also quite annoyed by it as despite the fact that Amazon's review and the O'Reilly web site make mention of it covering XML to PDF creation (the reason I bought it) it actually doesn't cover it at all.
   
   If you have need for advanced XSML topics that isn't covered by the many excellent online tutorials, particularly IBM's then you are extremely unlikely to find them in this book.

3. Simply outstanding and packed with great recipes

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2003

   XSLT isn't exactly the easiest of technologies to master, but this goes a long way to helping you. Even if you still can't get your head around it, the examples are designed in such a way that you can simply steal them with minimal tweaking required. The book starts with using XSLT to perform operations that you might normally use a programming language for - string manipulation, arithmetic, date and time functions - and moves generating graphs (with SVG), processing multiple document formats, generating C++ source code and much more. For me, the most useful section was the one describing how to use XSLT to generate documentation from WSDL documents. Some of the more arcane recipes are unlikely ever to find real world use, admittedly, but it's fascinating to see how far the author can push the technology. This is definitely not another book which concentrates solely on generating HTML from XML ans is all the better for it.