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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 12:50:23PM -0400, dave.m.parker AT gsk.com wrote:
> 
> I want to/sort of need to/or at least it would be useful if I could learn 
> XML. What's the best book to buy for a newby like me?

Dave, there really isn't much to XML if you've got experience with HTML
and/or arbitrary SGML markup; it's a much simplified subset of SGML.
If you can name each part of this snippet, you already "know" XML's basics.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<root attribute="value">
 <element>
  <nestedelement attribute="value">contents &amp; stuff</nestedelement>
 </element>
 <singleton attribute1="foo" attribute2="bar" />
</root>

What's more important is knowing what tools you'll be using to work with
it, whether you'll be using DTDs or schemas, etc. and what sort of data
it will contain; from there you can look for more specific resources
for those environments. 

For example, for enemieslist I use emacs with James Clark's nXML and
a pair of RELAX NG schemas to allow for validation. I use XML::Simple
from perl's CPAN to read and process the data in the files. Depending
on your situation, and your skillset, there's probably an appropriate
toolkit for you to use when managing XML.

Steve

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