This powerful new edition provides developers with a comprehensive guide to the rapidly evolving XML space. Serious users of XML will find topics on just about everything they need, from fundamental syntax rules, to details of DTD and XML Schema creation, to XSLT transformations, to APIs used for processing XML documents. Simply put, this is the only reference of its kind among XML books.Whether you're a Web designer using SVG to add vector graphics to web pages, or a C++ programmer using SOAP to serialize objects into a remote database, XML in a Nutshell thoroughly explains the basic rules that all XML documents -- and all XML document creators -- must adhere to, including:
- Essentials of the core XML standards: With this book, you can develop an understanding of well-formed XML, DTDs, namespaces, Unicode, and W3C XML Schema quickly.
- Key technologies used mainly for narrative XML documents such as web pages, books, and articles: You'll gain a working knowledge of XSLT, Xpath, Xlink, Xpointer, CSS, and XSL-FO.
- Technologies for building data-intensive XML applications, and for processing XML documents of any kind: One of the most unexpected developments in XML has been its enthusiastic adoption for structured documents used for storing, and exchanging used by a wide variety of programs. This book will help you understand the tools and APIs needed to write software that processes XML, including the event-based Simple API for XML (SAX2) and the tree-oriented Document Object Model (DOM).
Quick-reference chapters also detail syntax rules and usage examples for the core XML technologies, including XML, DTDs, Xpath, XSLT, SAX, and DOM. If you need explanation of how a technology works, or just need to quickly find the precise syntax for a particular piece, this up-to-date edition is ready with the information.
XML in a Nutshell is an essential guide for developers who need to create XML-based file formats and data structures for use in XML documents. This is one book you'll want to close at hand as you delve into XML.
Concise, accurate and sharply focused,
XML in a Nutshell is a complete introduction to the essentials of the XML standard. It aims to give software developers a full understanding of how XML works, and also provides a handy reference to the version 1.0 recommendation from the W3C (Word Wide Web Consortium).
In four parts, the first part introduces XML and covers the fundamentals, including chapters on Document Type Definitions, Namespaces, and Internationalisation. The next part focuses on XML as a document format, with coverage of XHTML, XSL transformations, XPath, XLinks and XPointer, and using CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) or XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects). Data transmission and programming are the focus of the third part, which explains the Document Object Model and introduces SAX (the Simple API for XML). The final part is the reference section, and covers XML 1.0, XPath, XSLT, DOM, SAX and character sets.
XML is a slippery subject. It is really a family of many related specifications, most of which are still evolving, and in addition most developers need to know about several XML applications alongside the core technology. This handbook sticks mostly to the core of XML, so you should not expect more than a mention of SOAP, SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics), or MathML, to take three examples. It is disappointing to find hardly any coverage of the XML Schema language.
For what it does cover though, XML in a Nutshell is a masterpiece of compression, laying the foundations for an excellent understanding of XML and finding space for example code and apt comments along the way. --Tim Anderson
