Learning XML/XSL/Xpath/Xquery...

[realityhack]

Can anyone recommend some decent books to start with? I have an overview of XML and it looks quite simple - it's the rest of it I need to understand.

[Spacecadet]

you can get most of what you need to know from the web

if you insist on a book then i got this one:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beginning-Xm...2774517&sr=8-1
its a fairly heft one so plenty to keep you going

[realityhack]

Thanks - I prefer to get the basics from a book and search around online for the rest - saves time in front of the monitor. This one seems to have everything except XQL.

[Cowboy Bob]

Ask AtW for help

[AtW]

Xpath and XQuery suck - whoever did them was smoking some bad granola (sp?), the idea was noble but implementation is a missed opportunity - if I was not paid well for implementing a solution using these thingies then I'd probably go postal: they have "variable" keyword to describe a constant because once assigned this "variable" can't be changed, so simple loop with integer accumulator that would count simple sum is out of question, ffs!

The books that I have seen (and I think I checked all of them for this topic) suck badly - the writers talk a lot about obvious things, yet they clearly never worked on a real world problems that would involve language constructs that 99.99999% of programmers are used, the rest 0.0000001% are the ones who smoked bad granola and invented a pile of rubbish that is XSL/XPath/XQuery etc.

Search General archives and around September last year you will find my multiple posts on the subject...

[Cowboy Bob]

Told you

[HankWangford]

Xpath and XQuery suck - whoever did them was smoking some bad granola (sp?), the idea was noble but implementation is a missed opportunity - if I was not paid well for implementing a solution using these thingies then I'd probably go postal: they have "variable" keyword to describe a constant because once assigned this "variable" can't be changed, so simple loop with integer accumulator that would count simple sum is out of question, ffs!

The books that I have seen (and I think I checked all of them for this topic) suck badly - the writers talk a lot about obvious things, yet they clearly never worked on a real world problems that would involve language constructs that 99.99999% of programmers are used, the rest 0.0000001% are the ones who smoked bad granola and invented a pile of rubbish that is XSL/XPath/XQuery etc.

Search General archives and around September last year you will find my multiple posts on the subject...

ah but with extension objects you can step away from the limitations of xslt into the managed world and all these problems go away, why iterate a nodeset in xslt when it can be done in c#.

[scotspine]

i've been told that string functions on an xmlreader is *much* faster than using xpath. be interesting to hear the congregation's take on that...

[Cowboy Bob]

i've been told that string functions on an xmlreader is *much* faster than using xpath. be interesting to hear the congregation's take on that...

That's fine if you're just trying to get a particular piece of data out of a DOM tree (but even then, if you've already got the whole DOM tree loaded then XPath is a lot more convenient), but if you're wanting to transform the whole document (say using FOP to convert XML to a PDF) you're not going to want to go down the route of doing it manually.

If you've not got the XML loaded already, the quickest way to find the data is to use a SAX parser and break out when you've found what you need.

[scotspine]

"but even then, if you've already got the whole DOM tree loaded then XPath is a lot more convenient" - that's true but the whole point is to avoid having to do that if poss. (load into an xmldocument). a recent problem was having to extract a repeating series of nodes from a large document which contained many documents and stick them all (the subsets) into oracle. was faster using a reader.