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Re: Good book on XML?

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On 06/08/2025 03:33, Anonymous wrote:
> Can anyone tell an aspiring web author of a good book on XML that 
> will really explain it all and give examples? If so it would help me
> a lot.

I'm probably the worst to reply, as I was on the XML SIG, and I already 
knew SGML so there wasn't a teach-yourself book at the time. From what I 
have seen, Erik T Ray's "Learning XML" and Elliotte Rusty Harold's "XML 
in a Nutshell" (both O'Reilly) are solid. I use XML for large scale text 
documents, so I don't know the current web environment you'd be using.

For my sins, I edit the XML FAQ at https://xml.silmaril.ie so if you 
could say what bits you find missing, or which need better explanation, 
please let me know. It's not intended as a tutorial, though, so there is 
no step-by-step teach-yourself in there. There are lots of online 
tutorials, like https://www.w3schools.com/xml/ but I cannot say how 
reliable they are.

There are lots of books on specific aspects of XML like those about 
using XML in a .NET environment, or a Java environment, or a Javascript 
environment which are doubtless useful in those areas, but can't replace 
a basic understanding of XML itself.

There are also lots of books on applications of XML, like DocBook for 
computing documentation; TEI for Humanities documents; DITA for 
industrial structured content; or SVG (graphics), but you probably need 
to know XML before starting these.

And there are lots of books on XML tools — programs that read and write 
XML or do other stuff with it. The most important is probably XSLT, the 
language which lets you write transformations between XML and other file 
formats; and its companions XQuery (query framework); XPath (language 
for addressing into an XML document); and XForms (for forms). There are 
also those about using XML from inside various programming languages, 
and there are dozens of open-source utilities for doing various things 
with XML documents and data.

Do let us know how you get on.

Peter

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Good book on XML? Anonymous <nobody@remailer.paranoici.org> - 2025-08-06 02:33 +0000
  Re: Good book on XML? Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-08-19 00:39 +0100

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