This Weeks Giveaway

[Stanley Tan]

Thanks Mapraputa Is! How do you make all those nice smileys?

[Mapraputa Is]

All smiles are here: http://www.javaranch.com/ubb/smilies.html

[Damian White]

Hi guys,
Over the past few weeks, I have noticed a lot of posts by people who have questions about the Wrox Editorial process. These questions are usually directed to the authors who guest in the forums and I don't think it is fair to ask them when they only write the content
I work for Wrox here in England and I think it would be great for you guys to ask us these sorts of questions directly! Therefore Jan Kolasinski, Wrox' Brand Manager, will go into the Meaningless Drivel forum this week and he will answer any questions you may have about Wrox! You can even ask him about Wrox' cover designs, I know you've been discussing it already

Originally posted by Ajith Kallambella:
Jeremy,
I have read all the XML books published by Wrox and I can't stop wondering about the oversteppings. Consider XML Databases (by Kevin Williams), Professional Java XML and Professional XML. These three books have about 30% common content. What is the rationale in making the book FAT with redundant stuff? If you follow the career path at the back of the book, most of the times you end up reading the same stuff again and again in different books. This doesn't make sense even from the marketing standpoint. This is very typical of Wrox publications. If you look at others( O'Reilly, Sams, AW etc ), their books are very focussed and two books on the same subject has no or very minimal overstepping.
I personally feel there is a lot of fat that can be removed from the "Professional Java XML" .
Jeremy, do you have any insight into this very unique nature of Wrox publications?

[James Hart]

Ajith,
As Damian has suggested, general queries about Wrox's unique style will probably be best answered by Jan (my boss) in the Meaningless Drivel forum. However, since I was the technical architect of Professional Java XML, it was my job to look after the overall scope of the multi-author title, and ensure that the book fits in with our other output, so I'll do my best to answer your query so far as it specifically relates to this book.
Professional Java XML has the basic brief to teach, to an experienced Java developer, the theory and practice of using XML in application development. That's a very different brief to our other XML titles, but it does encompass some of the same topics. However, those topics will be covered in different books from different angles, with different goals and to different depths. Each of our books stands on its own (as you would expect for a thousand-page tome that costs sixty dollars), but it also complements the other books in the field. So, while Professional XML covers, say, schemas - a topic covered already in Professional Java XML, Professional XML's coverage goes deeper into the data-modelling and structural XML-related areas of the schema standard, while Professional Java XML only talks about how you might use them in a Java program. Where a topic is already familiar to you, the coverage offered in our book may serve as useful review, or give a fresh perspective that reinforces your understanding.
I believe that our approach means that the single Wrox book, such as Professional Java XML, offers considerably more on its own than a combination of several more 'focused' books from other publishers, by focusing instead of on one single technology, on how a wide range of technologies can be combined in different ways to achieve a certain goal.

Originally posted by Ajith Kallambella:
Jeremy,
I have read all the XML books published by Wrox and I can't stop wondering about the oversteppings. Consider XML Databases (by Kevin Williams), Professional Java XML and Professional XML. These three books have about 30% common content. What is the rationale in making the book FAT with redundant stuff? If you follow the career path at the back of the book, most of the times you end up reading the same stuff again and again in different books. This doesn't make sense even from the marketing standpoint. This is very typical of Wrox publications. If you look at others( O'Reilly, Sams, AW etc ), their books are very focussed and two books on the same subject has no or very minimal overstepping.
I personally feel there is a lot of fat that can be removed from the "Professional Java XML" .
Jeremy, do you have any insight into this very unique nature of Wrox publications?

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James Hart
Wrox