It's not often that a technical book has me laughing so hard I spit coffee. While skimming the XSLT Cookbook this morning, I came across the recipe for calculating square roots using an XSLT template. That brought on the giggles, and the following recipe, for calculating logarithms, finished me off. I haven't seen anything that perverse since an article describing how to render polygons using SQL. Yes, it can be done, but... but...
I use XSLT and Perl quite a bit and some time I do find it frustrating that I can't use Perl in the middle of s stylesheet, but have to do things in XSLT and naturally vice versa. I've not used the latest tricks in LibXSLT, but I think calling Perl subroutines from XSLT may solve a lot of my pain....
Other than the obvious fact that you can so something in XSLT that you really shouldn't what did you think about the book overall? I have it in my shopping basket at Amazon, but I've not decided yet if I really want it.
Re:Overall what do you think?
dws on 2003-04-02T09:29:02
I've only skimmed the book and read a dozen or so recipes carefully. It seems fairly well written, but does presuppose that the reader knows the theory of XSLT, and XPath in particular. There's nothing in the way of summary or tutorial. If you're already comfortable with the theory, this book will show you lots of nifty tricks and techniques. I'm not, and have set the book down until I can read up on the basics.
