March/April 2005 | Home

Book Review: XML Hacks

by Patrick Lufkin
STC Senior Member

XML Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

Michael Fitzgerald, O’Reilly, 2004 [ISBN 0-596-00711-6, 478 pages, $24.95 USD]

XML—A Technology You Need to Know

Since its first appearance as a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation in early 1998, the Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become increasingly popular. XML markup looks a lot like HTML, but instead of indicating how text is to be displayed, the markup indicates a datum’s meaning within a document, e.g., “Part number” or “Price.” As a result you get “smart data” and “smart documents,” which can then be stored, searched, sorted, parsed, combined, and displayed in a myriad of ways.

Because of its power and flexibility, XML is the technology of choice wherever smart structured information is needed. Today XML is routinely being used to improve the utility of web pages, to manage data for electronic interchange, to convert documents from one type to another, and much more.

XML Hacks

Whether you are using XML now, or suspect that it might be in your future, you might want to take a look at XML Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools, from O’Reilly.

Each book in O’Reilly’s “Hacks” series presents an impressive collection of tips, tricks, tools, and workarounds for getting the most out of a particular tool or technology. Other books in the series can be found on the Hacks page.

XML Hacks is a gold mine for “techies” who want to explore, experiment, and push the XML envelope. But if you are not particularly technical, don’t let that put you off. Because the book is divided into 100 discrete hacks, most of which only take a page or two to explain, it is an excellent source of quick solutions to practical real-world problems such as converting plain text to XML, or HTML to XHTML. Taken as a whole, the book also provides a good overview of the many things that can be done with XML.

Easy Gradient

XML Hacks is organized to move the reader from the very basic to the increasingly complex. It starts with clear explanations of the parts of an XML document, covers how to display XML documents in a browser, and moves on from there. Among the hacks are many that may be of particular interest to technical communicators:

• Editing XML files using various editors
• Converting Microsoft Office files to XML
• Converting old comma-separated text files into XML and vice versa
• Generating PDF files and SVG graphics from XML documents
• Converting SGML files to XML
• Creating books, technical manuals, and papers in XML with DocBook

For the more technically adept, further hacks show how to validate documents against an XML schema, create document type definitions, and more.

Resources

Much of the magic of XML is unleashed through the use of software tools that parse, validate, and manipulate files in various ways. Many of these tools are introduced in the hacks, along with details on how to obtain them. Many are free or low cost, and readily available on the Web.

Sample hacks and all code examples from the book are downloadable from the O’Reilly web site.

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