XML is a text-based markup language that has taken the programming world by storm. More powerful than HTML yet less demanding than SGML, XML has proven itself to be flexible and resilient. XML is the perfect tool for formatting documents with even the smallest bit of complexity, from Web pages to legal contracts to books. However, XML has also proven itself to be indispensable for organizing and conveying other sorts of data as well, thus its central role in web services like SOAP and XML-RPC. As the Perl programming language was tailor-made for manipulating text, few people have disputed the fact that Perl and XML are perfectly suited for one another. The only question has been what's the best way to do it. That's where this book comes in.
Perl & XML is aimed at Perl programmers who need to work with XML documents and data. The book covers all the major modules for XML processing in Perl, including XML:: Simple, XML:: Parser, XML:: LibXML, XML:: XPath, XML:: Writer, XML:: Pyx, XML:: Parser:: PerlSAX, XML:: SAX, XML:: SimpleObject, XML:: TreeBuilder, XML:: Grove, XML:: DOM, XML:: RSS, XML:: Generator:: DBI, and SOAP:: Lite. But this book is more than just a listing of modules; it gives a complete, comprehensive tour of the landscape of Perl and XML, making sense of the myriad of modules, terminology, and techniques. This book covers:
parsing XML documents and writing them out again working with event streams and SAX tree processing and the Document Object Model advanced tree processing with XPath and XSLT
Most valuably, the last two chapters of Perl & XML give complete examples of XML applications, pulling together all the tools at your disposal. All together,
Perl & XML is the single book that gives you a solid grounding in XML processing with Perl.
Erik T. Ray has worked for O'Reilly and Associates as a software developer and XML specialist since 1995. He helped to establish a complete publishing solution using DocBook-XML and Perl to produce books in print, on CD-ROM, and for the new Safari web library of books. As the author of the O'Reilly best seller Learning XML and numerous articles to technical journals, Erik is known for his clear and entertaining writing style. When not hammering out code, he enjoys playing card games, reading about hemorrhagic fevers, practicing Buddhist meditation, and collecting toys. He lives in Saugus, MA with his wife Jeannine and 7 parrots. Jason McIntosh is formerly a member of the O'Reilly & Associates Tools Group, where he performed Perl and XML hacking daily, writing programs to help manage the company's bestiary of books as DocBook XML. He is currently a freelance writer/hacker, and the creator of ComicsML, an XML-based markup language for online comics.
