This book is not just for readers wishing to learn about the capabilities of SGML. It provides a complete discussion of the processes involved in maintaining and publishing large collections of corporate information. It shows how an SGML-based system can provide a robust and long-lasting solution that will cope with multiple publications and multiple media.

The book is organized in three parts: “The Business Issues,” “The Project,” and “The Language.” The first part covers the evolution of publishing systems within business organizations and introduces the general principles of SGML. It relates publishing to corporate information and explains how SGML publishing might fit into an overall environment of corporate databases, workflow management, and other business processes. Part 2, “The Project,” concentrates on the problems of analyzing corporate documents, designing appropriate SGML document types, converting existing information into SGML, and planning the implementation of the overall system. This part includes issues such as design strategies, version control, the interdependencies of various parts of the system, and the skills needed by members of the implementation team.

Part 3, “The Language,” provides a fairly conventional introduction to the features of SGML. It does, however, relate the features to some of the issues covered in the earlier parts of the book, and contains a useful chapter called “Tipniques and Pratfalls” that explains how to cope with a number of practical problems.

The book is rounded out with several appendices and an index. The appendices include three interesting case studies of the use of SGML in large organizations; an annotated version of the SGML document type definition used to produce the book; a fully commented SGML declaration; a glossary of terms and acronyms; and information on SGML products and resources.

There is a chicken-and-egg dilemma for a book of this type. Do you explain SGML first, then explain how to use it in a wider context? Or do you explain the context first, then SGML? The authors of this book, unlike the authors of a number of previous books, have chosen to explain the context first. The book is therefore likely to appeal more to those who start from a need to update their publishing strategy than to those who want to learn about SGML. Most of the time I felt that this approach worked, but it occasionally seemed difficult to understand the claims and approaches discussed in the earlier parts of the book unless one already has a fairly detailed understanding of the workings and peculiarities of SGML. (In a number of places in the earlier parts, detailed bits of SGML appear without explanation. I wonder whether the authors shuffled the material and missed a few of these references as a result.)

Overall, however, this book is a significant and useful addition to the rapidly growing literature on SGML. Some readers might wish to change the order in which they tackle the material, but it contains an enormous amount of useful information and covers wider implementation and business issues than do many previous books.