Book

[Bill de hÓra]

"Steve" <wrights at Spam.accuread.com.Filter> wrote in message
news:l1Ai5.1400$Vc.974150 at newsr2.u-net.net...
> Anyone bought the book "XML Processing with Python"?
>
> What do you think of it?


I used it to help me evaluate Zope :). Sean McGrath is well known in the XML
and W3C communities. He's a fierce Python advocate and he's straight up
about it. He believes that XML is best manipulated with Python, which goes
against populist wisdom right now, read: Java. His company uses Python, so
it's not a handwaving exercise.  Your mileage may vary on opinionated
writing. I'm all for it.

It's obvious that he has a deep understanding of XML, and can manipulate
Python. He does a good job of explicating how well Python and XML complement
each other. It's well written, in an informal engaging style. He's Irish,
and we are all of us superb writers...

Standards tech book caveats apply: large type, thick leaves, redundant code
print outs, usual drill. Then again, ORA's Java&XML reprints SAX, comments
and all, which is inexcusable really (reading the two books side by side is
educational). Authors can't really be marked down for publishers
unwillingness to produce tidier more elegant books, Addison Wesley excluded.
My main grip was that the book starts off a wee bit slow, which is a nice
way of saying that the first eighty pages could have been edited down.

The quality of XML books all round is not good, many authors seem to learn
the stuff as they go along, and not too well at that. This is not the case
here. This is a good book to give to a decision maker wrt to XML strategy,
who may be blinded by a wall of Java marketing, if only to confuse them .
Times like this makes me wish Python was owned by a company who could market
it fully...

So, yes, do get yourself a copy.

-Bill de hÓra