- Average Customer Review:
Based on
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- Amazon.com Sales Rank: 194552
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Product Description The definitive guide to state-of-the-art XML publishing with XSL-FO! XSL-FO (XSL-Formatting Objects) enables enterprise applications to publish graphic-arts quality printed and electronic documents from any XML data store, no matter how large or complex. In Definitive XSL-FO, one of the world’s leading XML experts shows how XSL-FO is revolutionizing document publishing. The book offers concise, authoritative, example-rich guidance on using the entire XSL-FO specification, including: XSL-FO’s objectives, semantics, and vocabulary
Key concepts, including layout-based versus content-based formatting, and formatting versus rendering
Area and page fundamentals: area models, block and inline basics, containers, page definition, and sequencing
Generic body constructs and tables
Static content and page geometry sequencing
Footnotes, floats, breaks, keeps, spacing, borders, and backgrounds
Interactive objects for dynamic displays
Supplemental publishing objects, including bidirectional Unicode scripts
Using XSLT with XSL-FO
Includes powerful quick reference tables for XSL-FO expressions, objects, and properties Part of The Charles F. Goldfarb Definitive XML Series™
Featured Customer Reviews  The Definitive HOW NOT to write a technical book,
January 28, 2010
"The hierarchical area tree has familial relationships between nodes of the tree;
- a node can be child, sibling, parent, descendant, ancestor, or root;
- a set of nodes are ordered with the parent
- there is only one order of sibling nodes;
- this ordering defines initial, preceding, following, and final relationships;
(etc.)"
Got that? If you already know anything about XSL, this is useless verbiage, and if you don't, you're certainly not going to learn it from this drivel.
I tried reading this book when I first started working with XSL-FO and quickly gave up. Now that I know a bit about it and have used XSL-FO on and off for a few years, I tried giving the book another chance. The verdict? Completely useless; not even a good reference -- the actual specification works better for this. For a book this bad there needs to be a way of awarding negative stars.
 So many words saying so little,
July 02, 2007
Painful experience,
November 03, 2006 I bought this book almost two years ago. Everytime I need to do something in XSL-FO I reach for this book. And almost everytime, I am frustrated and disappointed.
When originally learning XSL-FO, I bought this book because there were not too many options on the market and still aren't many. I felt like it made the learning process way more difficult than was necessary. I read two or three technical books per month and can usually absorb them pretty quick. This book does such a poor job of explaining concepts I struggled for a long time. I am really good with HTML, XML, XPATH and XSLT. I also have a pretty good grasp of print layout concepts and terminology. So I believe my struggle was by no means a technical or conceptual struggle. It was simply a problem of deciphering the author's language and presentation style.
As a reference, this book is even worse! It is just a bulleted list of tags and properties. Most are not defined. Two sentences and simple example of each would have made it useful, but that does not exist.
The one thing that could have saved this book would have been the index. But unfortunately, it's pretty bad also. You can't look up things by concept. You have to know what tag or property you are looking for. That's not of much use. For example, you will not find concepts such as bold, italic, underline or capitalization in the index. So if you don't know what tag or property controls those things you're out of luck. And since the author did such a bad job of teaching you're totally SOL.
I have learned XSL-FO through my own trial and error. I've done a lot of XSL-FO work and feel I have a decent understanding of the subject. Looking back on this book one last time, I can say this is one of the worst technical books I've ever bought.
Not a learning tool,
August 11, 2005 Minimal examples, very little "big picture" orientation, long reference-style lists with minimal explanation of terms if any, and gives short shrift to how XSL:FO works with XSLT. The omission of fo: prefixes in examples is a an auctorial preference I find particularly annoying. Unfortunately it appears to be difficult to locate alternative books.Definitive - Yes, Effective - No,
April 11, 2005 I'm surprised so many people have given this book a good review. I went with this book after the O'Reilly book was back ordered. What a mistake. The book might cover every formatting object in the W3C XSL-FO recommendation, but it's more like reading just that, the recommendation (which can be found online).
It's a bulleting of objects with minimal examples and sometimes difficult to understand explanations. I'm giving it two stars only because it serves as a useful quick formatting object reference to me at this point.
Avoid this book if you're new to XSL-FO. Otherwise, if you're looking for a reference guide, this might fit what you need.
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