155cafeblog - DocBook: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly XML)

Product Description

DocBook is a Document Type Definition (DTD) for use with XML (the Extensible Markup Language) and SGML (the Standard Generalized Markup Language). DocBook lets authors in technical groups exchange and reuse technical information. The emerging generation of Web browsers will be able to read and search XML documents; therefore authors will be able to create DocBook documents that function both as professionally produced hard-copy books and as online documents available over the World Wide Web. This book contains an introduction to SGML, XML, and the DocBook DTD, plus the complete reference information for DocBook.

BuZZ from Customer Shopping

Excellent but dense!
This book describes the de facto standard for creating technical documents - the Docbook Data Type Definition (DTD). Docbook is used by most of the major Linux vendors, the Linux Documentation Project, and many large companies. Docbook is a specific set of SGML tags which can be used to create technical books, articles, etc. The book is largely a very clear description of each tag which exists in the Docbook DTD. The appendices cover issues like installation and getting started, which are too brief for my taste. The authors give a brief intro to SGML, describe the structure of a Docbook document, and then jump into the tag descriptions. The problem is, there is no such thing as a Docbook application, like MS Word or something. Either you have to write documents by hand in a text processor (e.g. Notepad or vi), or you need a terribly expensive SGML tool to automate the process for you (e.g. Arbortext's products). It took me quite a while to understand that!

Good reference with a couple of flaws
The DocBook standard is a way of marking up a document so it can be printed in multiple ways. The benefit is that the document you create contains only the content -- if you want to generate web pages, or a printable file, the same source text file will do both for you. This can save you a lot of time in maintaining parallel print and web versions.

I used this book to create an employee handbook for my company in both print and web formats, and found it very handy, though it does have a couple of problems. Good things first: it contains a complete reference to every element in the DocBook standard, so you can look up Note or SimpleList or Article or RevHistory and find everything you need to know. This is the bulk of the book, in fact, and is what it is mostly useful for.

However, even these entries have one big flaw: they don't give you much of an indication of where they can be used. For example, if you want to add a Note to your text, can you do it from the section level, or do you have to be inside a para tag? The book won't give you this information if you look up Note--you have to look up all the different things it might be inside to find it. In practice this isn't too bad since you tend to settle down into a default set of tags you know well; it's more of a problem when you run into an exception.

The first five chapters give you an overview of SGML and XML, and then take you straight into the basics of creating DocBook documents. This section is good explanatory material and will definitely help orient you if you're not sure what DocBook can do for you. There's also a section on how to interpret OpenJade errors, which are among the least comprehensible error messages I've ever seen. This section is well-intentioned but not much use--the error messages are just too poorly written to be useful. They do give you the line number though, so that's usually where you have to start.

Installation and setup is another matter. There's an appendix which is helpful but there are a lot of pieces to get right and you should be prepared to take some time over this. Get help from someone who's done it before, if possible.

I would have liked to see a diagram of how all the pieces fit together--SGML, the parser, transformation, the DSSSL files, and the output formats. I had to draw my own to understand it.

Overall, recommended, for the explanatory material and the reference section; but it could be improved.

A Useful Book for SGML/DocBook Authors
This book presents full detail on the use of the DocBook "DTD," documenting the various sorts of elements that can be used to structure a sophisticated technical document.

DocBook supports all the sorts of titles, subtitles, paragraphs, tables, itemized environments, and such that are likely to be needed to produce something like a book, and this book documents in goodly detail the hundreds of such "document elements," and how they are put together.

There is an introductory section which swiftly runs through an overview of SGML/XML, and describes how DocBook may be customized. The book contains more documentation about the DSSSL rendering language than seems to be available anywhere else, although if there is to be disappointment in the book, it is in that "more than anywhere else" still isn't quite enough.

The body of the book then goes into detail on each and every document element. This is necessarily dry material, fortunately combined with often-humorous examples of how to use the elements.

What may NOT be obvious from the book is what tools should be used to edit DocBook documents, and what the production process should be like. Briefly, the more sophisticated the text editor, the better (in a word, Emacs!), and production usually to involve some sort of "batch" process that transforms DocBook into HTML, RTF, or TeX output.

The most visible users of DocBook are the many "Open Source" and "Free Software" projects that often surround Linux. Perhaps most well-known is the Linux Documentation Project, though DocBook is used for MANY other things. I prepare my own web pages using DocBook, for instance.

The existing tools for DocBook have the strength (over, say, using raw HTML) that they can automatically generate internal crossreferences, tables of contents, and the likes. A weakness is that other sorts of references (indexes, bibliographies) likely need programmed intervention. [Be prepared to write code...]

If you're planning to write technical documentation using DocBook, this is an excellent reference that you will likely greatly appreciate having. Personally, I prefer having a "dead trees" edition to page through to mousing through the online versions.

About DocBook: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly XML) detail

• Amazon Sales Rank: #244059 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 652 pages

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