Book Review: XML for Bosses

IT managers must balance their need to learn new technologies and the increasing demands put on their time. When managers want a "crash course" in a new area, they frequently turn to books, usually from such publishers as Wiley or Addison-Wesley. These books, however, tend to adhere to a one-size-fits-all philosophy: They provide overview information, but quickly expand to provide details specific to developers. Managers need to pick and choose the sections appropriate for them -- and hope they didn't skip something important.

In XML and the Enterprise for Managers author Benoît Marchal doesn't try to be all things to all people. He writes for the CTO and project leader market. In the short time it takes you to read Marchal's thirty-five page piece, you'll know what XML is, what standards have been built around XML, how to apply XML in publishing and development, and a little bit about parsers, the Document Object Model, Document Type Definition and XML Schemas. You will also be briefly introduced to some popular vocabularies such as WML, DocBook, and RosettaNet and have Web links to further explore these vocabularies. Will you be able to write your own well-formed XML documents and DTDs from scratch? Probably not. But that's why you read this book and your developers read one weighing in at 300 pages.

Benoît Marchal is an accomplished writer having published XML by Example with Que and Applied XML Solutions with Sams. He is also a contributing editor to Gamelan. His consulting company, Pineapplesoft, is based in Namur, Belgium.

Marchal makes the learning more enjoyable by framing the journey in a conversation between a manager and the author. Both are attending an XML conference, but the manager just doesn't seem to understand what the XML buzz is all about. He's working on an electronic catalogue project and is content with his current solution that uses Access file swapping between a limited number of resellers. Marchal "sells" the manager on the benefits of XML, such as platform-neutral data and multiple presentations of an XML document. In so doing, managers working in all domains will begin to see XML's strengths.

Note to developers: nothing in XML and the Enterprise for Managers should be new to you (just make sure your boss gets a copy). But perhaps in the coming months we can put together a roadmap of XML books for software developers so you can make some informed purchasing decisions to build up your library.

About the Author