Real World XML (2nd Edition) /by Steve Holzner. Inside XML is an intelligent and easy-to-follow guide to today's proliferating XML standards. Aside from being a road map to the latest and greatest in what's on the horizon with XML, this book gives you what you need to know to be productive with existing XML tools right now. The tour begins with an introduction to the XML used in real-world applications (like the Chemical Markup Language, CML, and the Vector Markup Language, VML [for graphics]). While many books give you the basics, this one excels at explaining the conventions of designing robust XML document types in detail. With dozens of short examples, you'll learn XML conventions thoroughly, including some of the best practices for creating readable, maintainable content. The author highlights certain lines of XML code, so it's easier to see what's important. After 200 pages of in-depth material on how to design XML documents, the book turns to using XML in actual browsers (both in Netscape and Internet Explorer). This practical focus means that you get to explore available Microsoft tools and how they sometimes differ from official W3C standards. Subsequent sections turn to related XML standards, like XLinks and XPointers. Each section lists Web links to the latest online documents, but the emphasis isn't on theory so much as on what you can do right now. You'll learn how to use Java with XML, including navigating the XML Document Object Model (DOM) using IBM's XML for Java (XML4J) package. The tutorial explaining the Simple API for XML (SAX) does a great job of explaining the advantages of this popular tool.
