XML in Office 2003, Charles Goldfarb and Priscilla Walmsley, 2004, Prentice-Hall PTR, ISBN 0-13-142193-X $39.99

This book discusses the use of XML in the new release of Office. However, it has a hard time figuring who is its intended audience. Naturally, I figured only technically oriented readers would have interest in such a narrow topic, but in fact it ambles a bit between very technical and no. It starts off by explaining the use of Office tools, such as Word, to manipulate and explore XML documents. It then briefly touches upon the specific XML generated by Word, Excel, and Access, with interesting discussions of how to leverage this output XML. InfoPath is explained, and Web services are entered into. Finally, there comes a far too brief section on Developing Office XML applications, which I would think would be the heart of the book. The final third of the book is a review/tutorial of XML with brief coverage of XSLT and related technologies. This book would be far better if it were tighter and focused on the needs of a specific audience, rather than trying to please all comers.

Definitive XSL-FO, G. Ken Holman, 2003, Prentice-Hall PTR, ISBN 0-13-140374-5 $49.99.

This book explains in great detail what XSL-Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) is and how to use it. It is intent on providing programmers with detailed information on how to leverage this technology successfully. XSL-FO is a codified way of describing all aspects of layout for print documents. It answers the crying need for a specific lexicon that is common to all document formats: Word, WordPerfect, FrameMaker, and many others. Now all can be translated into a specific vernacular of XML and be transformed into material suitable for other print-management systems or for publication in other mediums. This book gives developers all they need to know, with plenty of examples and detailed explanations. A reference section at the back goes over the various properties print files can exhibit. Highly recommended.

Learning XSLT, Michael Fitzgerald, 2004, O'Reilly & Associates, ISBN 0-596-00327-7, $34.95

In the tradition of the other Learning… books published by O'Reilly & Associates, this volume gets down to meat and potatoes right away. It takes you right into eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) and show you how this specification leverages the XML structure to transform data from one document into data suitable for a completely different purpose. Naturally, it also covers XPath in detail as the latter technologies expressive syntax is particularly useful in the management of data to be transformed. A clear, well-written, and intensely practical book.

Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, 2004, The Pragmatic Bookshelf (distributed by O'Reilly & Associates), ISBN 0-9745140-2-0, $29.95

Hunt and Thomas burst on the scene with their breakthrough book, The Pragmatic Programmer, which was an unarguably great book (published by Addison-Wesley). Since then, the authors have begun publishing a series of four titles under the heading of The Pragmatic Starter Kit. This "kit" includes introductory books on version control, unit testing (this book and its progenitor on Java and JUnit), and a forthcoming title on automation. These books are terrific, slim volumes for getting you up and running quickly. This book does a good job of taking readers from novice to journeyman tester for C# programs. One aspect I particularly liked is that the authors are not zealous extreme programmers; so unit testing is not presented in the context of religion, that is, it's not part of test-driven development. It's just unit testing.

For some reason, the authors abandoned Addison Wesley after their big success and decided to self-publish. This was not a good decision. The books are in dire need of a good edit. It is painful to read enjoinders about program quality while having to look past typographical errors and infelicities in the text. Perhaps working with O'Reilly and Associates will solve this problem, leaving the authors to focus on programming topics where they are undeniably talented. If you can see past the poor editing, this is a good book for getting a programmer up to speed on testing.

The C# Programming Language, Anders Heljsberg, Scott Wilamuth, and Peter Golde, 2004, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-15491-6, $29.99

This book is a reference volume which serves the same capacity as K&R's white book on C or Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language—it's the definitive presentation on the language. The tone of the book is official and formal, so it's closer to a reference volume like Stroustrup's tome, rather than Kernighan and Ritchie's very readable exposition. The publisher wisely recognized its role and gave the book a hard cover and a sewn-in bookmark--nice touches rarely seen anymore. This second printing includes discussion of all the new features in C# 2.0. A nearly indispensable reference for all serious C# programmers.

The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language, Paul Vick, 2004, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-16951-4, $44.99.

On the title alone, this book would seem to be a companion to its counterpart on C# described previously in these reviews. However, these books are very different. While the C# tome is a reference volume written in a mostly formal tone, this book is much more oriented to being read straight through. This makes for more informative explanations and a richer experience. The book's author is the author of the specification for VB.NET, so his knowledge is particularly deep. Because of this he is able to make important asides while explaining a topic. Recommended as a definition of the language and a most approachable tutorial. The book's pricing is peculiar: Whereas the C# is hardback and a good deal longer, this shorter, paperback costs 50% more. Go figure.

Graphics Programming with GDI+, Mahesh Chand, 2004, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-16077-0, $54.99

This book is the most comprehensive treatment of GDI+ published so far. However, that is about the extent of the good news. This book is flawed in many ways. First, the author has not defined the audience and he does not cater to what he expects them to know. At several occasions, he begins to discuss concepts that he defines or explain long after he's been discussing them. Normally, these goofs are caught in editing, but appear to have slipped through in this volume. At other times, he presents topics but provides insufficient information about the technology for the reader to know which of several paths is the best to choose. The examples he provides don't really tackle the hard problems. And when he finally gets to some interesting examples using images, the results are printed in black and white, so that you can't tell what has changed in the resulting image. Not recommended.

.NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference. Volume 1: Base Class Library and Extended Numerics Library, Brad Adams (with numerous commentators), Addison-Wesley, 2004, ISBN 0-321-15489-4 $64.99

It might seem odd for a second publisher to tackle a series of books explaining the complete .NET API set, given Microsoft's tour de force in this area. But this is what Addison-Wesley has undertaken in a series with what will be numerous volumes, of which this is the first. While the Microsoft series focuses on providing sample code in all of .NET's languages, this series provides considerably more textual background for each of the classes. In addition, the various commentators make individual observations about useful, sometimes subtle, aspects of the classes. In some cases, this remarks are surprisingly candid: Some discuss design errors in the classes and suggest ways around them. Code samples abound (they're all in C#) as do pure reference sections. A black-and-white poster is bound in and it shows the relationships of various classes to each other. My only objection to the book is that the arrangement of the treatments. They're not grouped by namespace but rather by class name. For example, System.Threading.Interlocked is immediately followed by System.InvalidCastException (because alphabetically, Interlocked precedes Invalid). This ordering means finding APIs is not intuitive and comparing aspects of two APIs often involves considerable page flipping. However, once you get to where you're going, you'll find the information worthwhile. Recommended.

The Common Language Infrastructure Annotated Standard, James S. Miller and Susann Ragsdale, Addison Wesley, 2004, ISBN 0-321-15493-2, $59.99

The definitive standard of the architecture and implementation of the CLI. This treatment includes detailed, annotated presentations of the file formats and metadata, as well as the complete instruction set. This is the quintessential volume for the cabal of programmers who write CLI assemblers and disassemblers and similar low-level tools.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works LLC. He was previously a senior technology analyst at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and earlier, the editor in chief of UNIX Review and C Gazette. He is the lead author of 'Practical Algorithms for Programmers,' from Addison-Wesley Longman, which is currently in its 12th printing and in use at more than 30 computer-science departments in the United States.