DocBook: The Definitive Guide
by Norman Walsh, Leonard Muellner
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O'Reilly and Associates (Sebastapol, Calif.): October 1999. Trade paperback, CD-ROM: xiii, 638 pages. ISBN-10: 1-56592-580-7 Suggested retail price: $36.95 (US) Tags: Computing; markup languages; SGML; writing; XML; XML Tactical strength: [6/10] |
DocBook, an SGML DTD, describes a markup language designed for creating technical documents. Walsh and Muellner certainly practice what they preach: they use the DocBook markup language while writing their reference work on DocBook. They have also made the entire source code for the book available, so the book becomes its own best example. DocBook provides a markup language that tags text based on content rather than on final appearance. For example, when you use a word as a word you usually represent that word in italics. In HTML, you would use the <i> tag to mark italics. In DocBook, you use <wordasword>. In HTML, you don't really know why someone used italics. In DocBook you don't worry about how the text will look, only what the text means.
DocBook: The Definitive Guide provides a complete reference of all the tags available DocBook. Since DocBook only marks up content, you have to run your DocBook files though some process to produce your final output. Ideally, you can use your DocBook source to produce plain text, HTML, RTF, PostScript, PDF, and TeX files. Since these processes do not technically belong to DocBook, Walsh and Muellner only cover them peripherally.
I understand that this book only documents the tags, but having a valid DocBook file doesn't do much good unless you have a way to get the file into a user-readable format. Norman Walsh also maintains the DSSSL and XSL style sheets to process DocBook files into HTML and printed documents. I would have like to see some extensive documentation of the style sheets in this book as well as more examples of customizing those style sheets to meet your individual needs.
DocBook provides a great, single-source solution for writing technical documents and will probably get stronger as the XML tools improve. Using DocBook comes with a fairly steep learning curve, and you have to invest a lot of time investigating solutions for processing DocBook documents.
