Book review "XML and Perl"

I continue my reviews with another antic Perl book 😄

Disclaimer

A lot of weaknesses of this book are due to the age but I won't refrain to report them with honesty :)

I'm very grateful to the person that took time to write this book : Mark Riehl and Ilya Sterin !

The bad

It is outdated, definitely, like a bit frozen in 2003.

I wrote another book review about Perl and LWP which was outdated also but not suffering as much as this book.

Clearly, this book was written during the "XML boom" in 2003 and keeps scars from this period :

• The coding style is not modern
• When you want to make people able to be quickly efficient with Perl and XML (probably the idea of the authors), you give a lot of "ready to use" code snippets (and it ages bad)

When I looked for some technologies in Google, I was suprised (but interested) to see they were just dead 😁 :

• Axkit
• XQL

There is only one edition of this book therefore it explains why it is so outdated.

The good

I liked the way it goes deep in the XML things like xslt, XML schema, xlink and xpointer.

I really appreciated to explanations about Web Services (very clear, best explanation I read about this topic so far !) SOAP and XML-RPC.

In the same topic, the comparison SOAP vs CORBA vs RMI vs ... is very nicely detailed.

In the part about XML in general, I found some very interesting parts :

• Listing and details about elements
• When to use attributes or elements (this endless question has a simple answer...)
• DTD vs XML Schema

And finally the paragraphs about tying XML to RDBMS are very interesting.

What is Schematron and WML ? 😁

Conclusion

To really enjoy this book, you need to know Perl but you should not know too much XML (which was not my case, I already studied the XML spec in the past to write an XML minifier)

There are TOO MUCH code samples, each time the XML sample + the DTD + Perl code to process it = TOO MUCH 😃

No human can read so much code samples without falling asleep 😴

But overall there's still a lot of history bits and various notions around XML and the book really deserves to be skimmed.