This book is written at several different levelsfrom basic to advancedbecause the XML spectrum is so broad. The rule of thumb is that this book was written to follow HTML books in level. We start at the basic level and gradually get more advanced in a slow, steady way. I'm not going to assume that you have any programming knowledge (at least until we get to the advanced topics in Chapter 20, such as JavaServer Pages and using Perl with XML) when you start this book. We'll be using both JavaScript and Java in this book, but all you need to know about those languages will be introduced before we use them, and it won't be hard to pick up. Because there are so many uses of XML available today, this book involves many different software packages; all the ones I'll put to work in the text are free to download from the Internet; I'll tell you where to get them. |