Who Should Read This Book?

You should read this book if you're interested in XQuery ”a statement that describes numerous technophiles these days. The members of two programming disciplines in particular, however, will find this volume especially valuable . XSLT developers will be interested in these essays . As noted above, XQuery shares a number of capabilities with XSLT and is likely to replace it in some areas. Michael Kay's chapter on "XQuery, XPath, and XSLT" (Chapter 3) examines the commonalities and differences between the two languages in some detail.

This book will also interest those who are corporately or otherwise involved with SQL and relational databases. XQuery has often been called SQL for XML, and that's no accident , given that several members of the working group come from a relational database background. XQuery was designed from the ground up to work with relational data. Two of the chapters in Part IV, "Databases," examine the connections between XQuery and relational data.

Whatever your specific background, you should be comfortable and familiar with XML basics to benefit most fully from this book. You'll do best if you have some prior exposure to XQuery, although it needn't be extensive . At a minimum, the book assumes that you understand the fundamentals of XPath and know what a location path is. Jonathan Robie's introductory guided tour provides a good overview of XQuery for those who aren't already familiar with the technology.