| The XSL Companion (Second Edition) by Neil Bradley is a practical hands-on guide to XSL split up into four distinct sections: Transformations using XSLT, XPath expressions, Formatting with XSL, and References. Fortunately for me, someone skilled in XML but not necessarily XSL, the author has shared his knowledge in an easy to understand way. |
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| Mr. Bradley uses 4 methodologies to get his point across: Flow charts describing data/logic flow to visualize text explainations, simplified and specific syntax examples next to text descriptions, element/attribute charts, and special templates to help you get around common problems. You will not see long, complex code examples.
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| The author keeps his topics to specific subject matter and glues it together with graphical presentations to hammer home the concept. In my opinion, this is crucial to the learning process especially with something as dynamic as XSL. I've yet to find a book in any language that does this quite as well as Mr. Bradley has done here. |
| Here are a few items I found interesting: |
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| Escape Characters |
| The author provides a nice template for handling problem characters in your XSL documents. |
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| ISO 8859/1 Character Set Table |
| If you don't already have a complete listing of this character set, you be glad it was included in the book. |
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| XPath Expressions |
| You'll learn a great deal about various XSL functions, case statements, comparisons, and selection methodologies. |
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| Sorting |
| Learn how to query nodes with XPath Expressions and sort the results. |
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| RTF |
| Gain insight into generating RTF documents via XSL. Stumbling blocks and the ways to overcome them are covered in detail. |
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| Cascading Style Sheets |
| Learn how to implement style sheets within your XSL documents. A nice property reference table is also included. |
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| Overall, I found The XSL Companion (Second Edition) to be extremely helpful in my endeavor to learn XSL. It made getting started much easier than some other books on XSL that I began reading in the past only to get frustrated with. I'd strongly recommend picking it today. |