This small book is full of concise but detailed information about SGML. It is intended for readers who have practical SGML applications to tackle and need a text that provides a clear, succinct description of all the commonly used features. No space is given to chatty introductory material designed to persuade readers that SGML is the answer to all their problems, and there are no case studies or exercises. Instead, the reader is taken rapidly through all the main features of SGML, with brief descriptions of their form and purpose and just enough examples to show how they are used in typical applications. Little-used features of SGML (such as rank, datatag, subdoc, and concur) are mentioned briefly but not described in any detail.

After two short chapters (11 pages in total) to set the scene, the book dives straight into details of the syntax of SGML markup. Six chapters (85 pages) cover markup, document components, entities, the document type definition (DTD), the SGML declaration, and cross-references. The brief tutorial descriptions include information on many of the well-known pitfalls, such as the treatment of spaces and new lines in different contexts, and when names are and are not case-sensitive.

The final four chapters explain how tables and mathematics are represented in SGML (using the CALS table model and ISO 9573 math), describe HTML 2.0 and 3.2, and outline the use of the public-domain SGMLS and NSGMLS parsers. The 30-page chapter on HTML is by far the longest in the book.

The tutorial chapters form the first half of the book. The second half contains a number of useful charts and tables, an extensive “road map” derived from the syntax production charts in the SGML standard, and a 60-page glossary with entries for all SGML terms and reserved names as well as more general items.

Overall, I found this a useful little book. The concise descriptions made it easy to find the information I wanted, and I appreciated the straightforward advice on DTD organization and practical system matters. SGML system developers will need more complete SGML books as well, but this is likely to become the well-thumbed one kept near to hand.