Effective XML

Sunday, I swang by the local Cupertino Borders (damn, there’s a lot of Mac programming books at that location… what’s the story there?) and picked up a book I’ve been stalking for over a year… Effective XML by XML God For Life, Elliotte Rusty Harold.

I’m almost done with the book, and I have not had a ton of time to spend with it… it’s just so good that I’m tearing through it at a really fast pace. What can I say, it’s a real page-turner.

The book is edited by (among others) Scott Meyers of Effective C++ fame, and follows the same format…

From the Introduction, I was hooked. ERH starts with a persnickety discussion of often-confused terms in the XML world. Such contentious distinctions as Entity vs Entity Reference, Text vs character data vs markup and XML application vs XML software. This kind of hair-splitting is what I live for… the intro left me twitching. In a good way.
The rest of the book follows the format you’d expect… 50 bathroom-reader-worthy expert tips and tricks to help you understand XML more deeply and use it more effectively. My favorites so far are Item 15 Build on top of Structures, Not Syntax and Item 21 Rely on Namepsace URIs, not Prefixes.

Listen… buy the book.