Great book for "real-world" XML
Everybody or most of everybody that are in web design in some form or another have heard about XML or even used it a bit. But personally I feel there are a small amount of resources out there that really teach you how to use XML in "real-world" scenarios. It's nice to know what it is and know that many applications use it behind the scenes, but it still doesn't help people understand how to use it for our own web applications.
This book solves that problem wonderfully by first showing you first what XML is and how to format proper XML documents. Then the author discusses how to publish XML documents in a couple web site examples (web catalog for one) and showing how to style these documents using regular CSS and XSLT, schemas as well as other technologies such as XPath and XQuery.
Each chapter presents a new problem (rendering XML to print, searching and merging documents, integrating web services, RSS feeds) and goes through step by step in how to work it out with really nice code examples. You really don't need to read this book end to end to get the most out of it. Just pick a chapter and read through it since the author re-summarizes what was previously covered to bring you up to speed.
So for example, if you have XML documents that you need to integrate into a database (DB2, SQL Server, etc) or want to learn how to create XML documents from a database table(s) it first shows the necessary SQL to pull the data you need, then how to use various tools to create your format.
The book does use one program (Stylus Studio 2006) in particular but the author mentions other open-source programs that you can use as well (in Appendix too). A great little book (under 300 pages) that shows you some great uses for XML as well as teaching you how and why you should use it.
A great buy!
