Slashdot has a review of Shelley Powers book, Practical RDF (Shelley comments on the review, too).
I bought a copy of the book the other week (stops to move it from "In Mind" to "In Hand"). There's a load of information on RDF on the web, but it's hard to find an edge to start at. Given some positive comments on the web, and the price tag (£28.50 -- the lass at the checkout commented on it) I was expecting great things.
First, I might say that the book has served as a decent introduction to RDF, and I now have enough of a framework in place so going deeper will be easier. I'd have prefered a more rigorous treatment, but I can't complain about that after buying a book called practical RDF. Given my still-limited amount of knowledge on the subject I should accept that some of my complaints might prove to be founded in misunderstanding. My impression, though, is that the proof reading was poor, and the editing not good enough either.
It is also possible that I found more errors simply because within an hour of spending thirty quid, I noticed a stray dot in some N-Triples listed on page 24, quickly followed by a misprint in a figure on page 26. After that I was tuned to look for mistakes, and I found plenty.
The positive side is that being tuned to look for mistakes has probably resulted in my giving the content of the book a mroe thorough going over. Tony Buzan reckons that if you give the same text to two groups of people, tell one that they will be examined on the content of the text in general, and the other that they will be examined on some specific aspect of it, but then examine everyone generally, the group who were expecting specific questions actually perform better. I suspect that even looking for typos can make you concentrate more.
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