Creating the Semantic Web with RDF: Professional Developer's Guide (With CD-ROM)

Author: Johan Hjelm List Price: $44.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0471402591 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (11 May, 2001) Edition: Paperback Average Customer Rating: 1.8 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

Unfortunately,I too cannot recommend this book to anyone.Here are
my reasons:

1)Both the title of the book as well as the title of the series(Professional Developer's Guide Series)are highly misleading.No developer will learn anything practical from this book.There are no examples or any other practical instructions whatsoever.The most "difficult" examples I could find were the analysis of statements like "Hjelm is the author of a book".

2)What this book is is a theoretical and acedemic discussion of artificial intelligence(AI),XML,RDF,and intelligent agents(IA).But here too there is a catch.You wont understand much unless you already know these fields.I have some background in these fields but I found the presentation so monotonous and boring that I too learned nothing new.

3)This book could have been a classic if properly written.Time may be ripe for artificial intelligence to enter the mainstream of computer world via the gateway of XML.Therefore,the unification of AI,XML,RDF,and IA is a highly fascinating project for the future.And a classic is desperately needed on this theme.But Hjelm's book is not that classic.

There are two problems: the content, and the author. The writing and editing is poor and sloppy. The text is disjointed to the point that I often had to flip back after moving to the next page, to make sure that I hadn't skipped one. At some points, it refers back to examples that don't exist, and at others, it refers to figures that just don't match up. The larger structure is as sloppy and disjointed as the text. It's not even useful as a reference, because no single section contains all the information needed to understand the format.

The book reads like what it is: an attempt to fill 320 pages with the information that could have been (and should have been) written in a 20 page white paper ...

His editorial comments are full of contradictions and misstatements that read more like Usenet flames than thoughtful commentary. He liberally trashes SOAP, AI, and CORBA, while ignoring or glossing over any shortcomings in RDF. My favorite contradiction: KQML is a failure because it uses a lisp-based syntax, which is *hard for humans to read*. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the book, he states that humans shouldn't write out their own RDF, and should always use a remote syntax checker, because it's just too easy to make a mistake. Looking at his half-page examples of even the simplest schemas, filled with angle brackets, quotes, and syntactic oddities, makes me long for the simplicity of a lisp-based syntax, even if I have to put up with a prefix notation.

The book is a waste of time and money. One could get more information, in a better format, and with less irritation, just by going to the w3c web site.

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