XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4/e

Michael Kay

  • 出版商: Wrox Press
  • 出版日期: 2008-04-01
  • 售價: $2,900
  • 貴賓價: 9.5$2,755
  • 語言: 英文
  • 頁數: 1368
  • 裝訂: Hardcover
  • ISBN: 0470192747
  • ISBN-13: 9780470192740
  • 相關分類: XML
  • 海外代購書籍(需單獨結帳)

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This book is primarily a practical reference book for professional XSLT developers. It assumes no previous knowledge of the language, and many developers have used it as their first introduction to XSLT; however, it is not structured as a tutorial, and there are other books on XSLT that provide a gentler approach for beginners.

The book does assume a basic knowledge of XML, HTML, and the architecture of the Web, and it is written for experienced programmers. There’s no assumption that you know any particular language such as Java or Visual Basic, just that you recognize the concepts that all programming languages have in common.

The book is suitable both for XSLT 1.0 users upgrading to XSLT 2.0, and for newcomers to XSLT. The book is also equally suitable whether you work in the Java or .NET world.

As befits a reference book, a key aim is that the coverage should be comprehensive and authoritative. It is designed to give you all the details, not just an overview of the 20 percent of the language that most people use 80 percent of the time. It’s designed so that you will keep coming back to the book whenever you encounter new and challenging programming tasks, not as a book that you skim quickly and then leave on the shelf. If you like detail, you will enjoy this book; if not, you probably won’t.

But as well as giving the detail, this book aims to explain the concepts, in some depth. It’s therefore a book for people who not only want to use the language but who also want to understand it at a deep level.

The book aims to tell you everything you need to know about the XSLT 2.0 language. It gives equal weight to the things that are new in XSLT 2.0 and the things that were already present in version 1.0. The book is about the language, not about specific products. However, there are appendices about Saxon (the author’s own implementation of XSLT 2.0), about the Altova XSLT 2.0 implementation, and about the Java and Microsoft APIs for controlling XSLT transformations, which will no doubt be upgraded to handle XSLT 2.0 as well as 1.0. A third XSLT 2.0 processor, Gestalt, was released shortly before the book went to press, too late to describe it in any detail. But the experience of XSLT 1.0 is that there has been a very high level of interoperability between different XSLT processors, and if you can use one of them, then you can use them all.

In the previous edition we split XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 into separate volumes. The idea was that some readers might be interested in XPath alone. However, many bought the XSLT 2.0 book without its XPath companion and were left confused as a result; so this time, the material is back together. The XPath reference information is in self-contained chapters, so it should still be accessible when you use XPath in contexts other than XSLT.

The book does not cover XSL Formatting Objects, a big subject in its own right. Nor does it cover XML Schemas in any detail. If you want to use these important technologies in conjunction with XSLT, there are other books that do them justice.

This book contains twenty chapters and eight appendixes (the last of which is a glossary) organized into four parts. The following section outlines what you can find in each part, chapter, and appendix.

Part I: Foundations: The first part of the book covers essential concepts. You should read these before you start coding. If you ignore this advice, as most people do, then you read them when you get to that trough of despair when you find it impossible to make the language do anything but the most trivial tasks. XSLT is different from other languages, and to make it work for you, you need to understand how it was designed to be used.

Chapter 1: XSLT in Context: This chapter explains how XSLT fits into the big picture: how the language came into being and how it sits alongside other technologies. It also has a few simple coding examples to keep you alert.

Chapter 2: The XSLT Processing Model: This is about the architecture of an XSLT processor: the inputs, the outputs, and the data model. Understanding the data model is perhaps the most important thing that distinguishes an XSLT expert from an amateur; it may seem like information that you can’t use immediately, but it’s knowledge that will stop you making a lot of stupid mistakes.

Chapter 3: Stylesheet Structure: XSLT development is about writing stylesheets, and this chapter takes a bird’s eye view of what stylesheets look like. It explains the key concepts of rule-based programming using templates, and explains how to undertake programming-in-the-large by structuring your application using modules and pipelines.

Chapter 4: Stylesheets and Schemas: A key innovation in XSLT 2.0 is that stylesheets can take advantage of knowledge about the structure of your input and output documents, provided in the form of an XML Schema. This chapter provides a quick overview of XML Schema to describe its impact on XSLT development. Not everyone uses schemas, and you can skip this chapter if you fall into that category.

Chapter 5: The Type System: XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 offer strong typing as an alternative to the weak typing approach of the 1.0 languages. This means that you can declare the types of your variables, functions, and parameters, and use this information to get early warning of programming errors. This chapter explains the data types available and the mechanisms for creating user-defined types.

Part II: XSLT and XPath Reference: This section of the book contains reference material, organized in the hope that you can easily find what you need when you need it. It’s not designed for sequential reading, though you might well want to leaf through the pages to discover what’s there.

Chapter 6: XSLT Elements: This monster chapter lists all the XSLT elements you can use in a stylesheet, in alphabetical order, giving detailed rules for the syntax and semantics of each element, advice on usage, and examples. This is probably the part of the book you will use most frequently as you become an expert XSLT user. It’s a “no stone unturned” approach, based on the belief that as a professional developer you need to know what happens when the going gets tough, not just when the wind is in your direction.

Chapter 7: XPath Fundamentals: This chapter explains the basics of XPath: the low-level constructs such as literals, variables, and function calls. It also explains the context rules, which describe how the evaluation of XPath expressions depends on the XSLT processing context in which they appear.

Chapter 8: XPath: Operators on Items: XPath offers the usual range of operators for performing arithmetic, boolean comparison, and the like. However, these don’t always behave exactly as you would expect, so it’s worth reading this chapter to see what’s available and how it differs from the last language that you used.

Chapter 9: XPath: Path Expressions: Path expressions are what make XPath special; they enable you to navigate around the structure of an XML document. This chapter explains the syntax of path expressions, the 13 axes that you can use to locate the nodes that you need, and associated operators such as union, intersection, and difference.

Chapter 10: XPath: Sequence Expressions: Unlike XPath 1.0, in version 2.0 all values are sequences (singletons are just a special case). Some of the most important operators in XPath 2.0 are those that manipulate sequences, notably the «for» expression, which translates one sequence into another by applying a mapping.

Chapter 11: XPath: Type Expressions: The type system was explained in Chapter 5; this chapter explains the operations that you can use to take advantage of types. This includes the «cast» operation which is used to convert values from one type to another.A big part of this chapter is devoted to the detailed rules for how these conversions are done.

Chapter 12: XSLT Patterns: This chapter returns from XPath to a subject that’s specific to XSLT. Patterns are used to define template rules, the essence of XSLT’s rule-based programming approach. The reason for explaining them now is that the syntax and semantics of patterns depends strongly on the corresponding rules for XPath expressions.

Chapter 13: The Function Library: XPath 2.0 includes a library of functions that can be called from any XPath expression; XSLT 2.0 extends this with some additional functions that are available only when XPath is used within XSLT. The library has grown immensely since XPath 1.0. This chapter provides a single alphabetical reference for all these functions.

Chapter 14: Regular Expressions: Processing of text is an area where XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 are much more powerful than version 1.0, and this is largely through the use of constructs that exploit regular expressions. If you’re familiar with regexes from languages such as Perl, this chapter tells you how XPath regular expressions differ. If you’re new to the subject, it explains it from first principles.

Chapter 15: Serialization: Serialization in XSLT means the ability to generate a textual XML document from the tree structure that’s manipulated by a stylesheet. This isn’t part of XSLT processing proper, so (following W3C’s lead) it’s separated it into its own chapter. You can control serialization from the stylesheet using an declaration, but many products also allow you to control it directly via an API.

Part III: Exploitation: The final section of the book is advice and guidance on how to take advantage of XSLT to write real applications. It’s intended to make you not just a competent XSLT coder, but a competent designer too. The best way of learning is by studying the work of ot...

商品描述(中文翻譯)

這本書主要是專為專業的XSLT開發人員而設計的實用參考書。它假設讀者對該語言沒有任何先備知識,許多開發人員將其作為首次接觸XSLT的入門書;然而,它並不是結構化的教程,還有其他針對初學者提供更緩和的方法的XSLT書籍。

這本書假設讀者對XML、HTML和Web架構有基本的了解,並且是為有經驗的程式設計師撰寫的。它並不假設你懂得任何特定的語言,如Java或Visual Basic,只要你認識所有程式語言共同具備的概念即可。

這本書適用於XSLT 1.0升級到XSLT 2.0的使用者,也適用於初學者。這本書同樣適用於在Java或.NET世界工作的人。

作為一本參考書,它的主要目標是全面且權威地涵蓋所有內容。它旨在提供所有細節,而不僅僅是大多數人80%時間使用的語言的概述。它的設計目的是讓你在遇到新的和具有挑戰性的編程任務時不斷回頭翻閱,而不是快速瀏覽一遍然後放在書架上。如果你喜歡細節,你會喜歡這本書;如果不喜歡,你可能不會喜歡。

除了提供細節外,這本書還旨在深入解釋概念。因此,這是一本不僅想要使用該語言,還想要深入理解該語言的人的書籍。

這本書旨在告訴你關於XSLT 2.0語言的一切你需要知道的。它同等重視XSLT 2.0中的新功能和已經存在於1.0版本中的功能。這本書關於語言,而不是特定產品。然而,附錄中有關於Saxon(作者自己的XSLT 2.0實現)、Altova XSLT 2.0實現以及用於控制XSLT轉換的Java和Microsoft API的內容,這些API無疑會升級以處理XSLT 2.0和1.0。第三個XSLT 2.0處理器Gestalt在書籍出版之前不久發布,來不及詳細描述。但是XSLT 1.0的經驗表明,不同的XSLT處理器之間存在非常高的互操作性,如果你能使用其中一個,那麼你就能使用它們全部。

在上一版中,我們將XSLT 2.0和XPath 2.0分為兩個獨立的卷。這樣做的想法是一些讀者可能只對XPath感興趣。然而,許多人購買了XSLT 2.0的書籍,卻沒有它的XPath伴侶,結果感到困惑;因此,這次將兩者的內容重新結合在一起。XPath的參考資訊在獨立的章節中,因此在使用XPath時,除了XSLT之外的上下文中仍然可以使用。

這本書不涵蓋XSL Formatting Objects,這是一個獨立的大主題。它也不詳細介紹XML Schemas。如果你想與XSLT一起使用這些重要的技術,還有其他書籍可以提供詳細的介紹。

這本書包含20個章節和8個附錄(最後一個是詞彙表),分為四個部分。以下部分概述了每個部分、章節和附錄中的內容。

第一部分:基礎知識:本書的第一部分涵蓋了基本概念。在開始編碼之前,你應該閱讀這些內容。如果你忽略這個建議,就像大多數人一樣,當你發現無法使語言執行除了最簡單任務以外的任何事情時,你會陷入絕望的低谷。XSLT與其他語言不同,為了讓它為你工作,你需要了解它的設計理念。

第1章:XSLT的背景:本章解釋了XSLT在整個大圖中的位置:語言的起源以及它如何與其他技術並存。它還包含一些...