Recently I have been approached by Packt Publishing to review their recently released book “Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g” by Deepak Vohra. They were kind enough to send me an e-book, which suits more to a person like me who lives out of suitcase.
Coming back to the point, as the book rightly mentioned, its objective is “to discuss XML development in Oracle JDeveloper” especially around JDeveloper 11g. JDeveloper has matured into a very robust IDE especially in J2EE and SOA arena. It’s XML handling capabilities are worthy enough to be mentioned separately. In a way Gaurav did a very smart job of focusing on one topic rather than try to cover wider topics in shallow waters.
First six chapters covers the basic of XML document, DOM, SAX, XSD, XSLT, XPath, JSTL XML taglibs. It was little bit an over-stretch for me, but I wouldn’t discount it completely as it can be really helpful for somebody who is really starting from scratch (truly no exemption). Most of the examples covered in these chapters can be easily mapped to other parsers without much difficulties. Chapter seven, eight and nine are amongst the ones which interested me most. I like theory portion of DOM 3.0 LS.
Chapter 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 covers interesting and useful applied XML technologies like XMLDiff, XML2PDF, XML2XLS, Berkeley and XML Publisher. Chapters cover enough to give you a start but to deal with real life scenarios you might have to dig deeper. All in all these chapters might excite those who really like to try something new and different.
Overall it’s an easy read book which explains XML fundamentals in easy to understand language. I would definitely like this book as a beginner but it doesn’t have a lot to offer at intermediate level. I would have like to see some literature around SDOM, AJAX, StAX. All in all this is a good beginners book covering XML and related technologies.
