An Excellent Resource
Rating:
5 / 5
This book is, without a doubt, one of the most helpful resources available to anyone seeking to understand DocBook XSL. Bob Stayton has done an incredible job gathering everything you need to know regarding this topic, and he presents it in a style that is both easy to navigate and easy to understand.
DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide takes the reader from the very beginnings of how to create custom output (whether print or HTML) using DocBook XSL. It includes information on the tools you need and how to set them up, giving you all the information you need to get started. But this book doesn't stop there--it continues with detailed, organized information on the myriad of ways you can create custom stylesheets that will generate your project precisely the way you want it. Everything is covered--from titlepages to bibliographies, this book leaves no topic unexplained.
It is extremely rare to find a book that truly is a complete guide to its subject matter. DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide more than lives up to its name--you will not find a better resource for understanding DocBook XSL.
A must-have for all serious docbook users
Rating:
5 / 5
I purchased that book as soon as it came out: I just knew I'd need it some day. That day came three weeks ago and I got into the book with a vengeance. I needed to utterly customize the docbooks stylesheets and produce 12'000 different pdf's in four languages out of a huge documentation DB. With the book next to me it was a breeze. Extremely well written, knowledgeable, accurate, just verbose enough to get the point across and and and.Beware: this is a book for people who are already very well versed in docbook in general, and in XSL in particular. One does wish the author would have offered ant versions of his scripts as well as Make versions. But that's a matter of taste.
Indispensable
Rating:
5 / 5
With this book and "DocBook: The Definitive Guide" in-hand, I
really can't imagine any other DocBook guide you'll ever need.The book thoroughly covers just about every possible aspect of
DocBook publishing (that is, generating HTML, PDF, HTML Help, man
pages, etc. from your DocBook XML source) -- from general tool
setup down to the level of stuff like fine-tuning content of
headers and footers, title pages, cross-references, indexes, etc. I have reviewed and used it a lot, and tried hard to come up with
suggestions for Bob for topics that should be added to it. But I
rarely manage to find anything that it doesn't already cover. When
I have a DocBook publishing question, I can almost always find the
answer in this book. And if you're not familiar with the author, here are some details:
in the DocBook world, Bob is basically "The DocBook Answer Man" --
he is the most active contributor to discussions on the
docbook-apps mailing list (where DocBook publishing and tools
discussion takes place) -- patiently answering "How do I..."
questions posted by new users and following up on DocBook XSLT
stylesheet bug reports. He's also a member of the DocBook Technical Committee, responsible
for overseeing refinements to the DocBook vocabulary, and he's a
major contributor to development of the actual DocBook XSL
stylesheets themselves. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that this guy knows his
stuff, and in buying and using this book, you'll be benefitting
from a wealth of knowledge and experience with DocBook that you'll
not find anywhere else.
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