What this Book Covers

This book aims to tell you everything you need to know about the XSLT 2.0 language. It gives equal weight to the things that are new in XSLT 2.0, and the things that were already present in version 1.0.

The book is about the language, not about specific products. However, there are appendices about Saxon (my own implementation of XSLT 2.0), and about the Java and Microsoft APIs for controlling XSLT transformations, which will no doubt be upgraded to handle XSLT 2.0 as well as 1.0. The experience of XSLT 1.0 is that there has been a very high level of interoperability between different XSLT processors, and if you can use one of them, then you can use them all.

The book is intended to be used alongside the companion volume XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference . Since XSLT 2.0 has such a strong dependence on XPath 2.0, you really need both books. Although there are a couple of appendices in this book summarizing details of XPath syntax and the function library, the information is not comprehensive and is provided purely for convenience on those occasions when you lent the other book to a colleague.

The book does not cover XSL Formatting Objects, a big subject in its own right. Nor does it cover XML Schemas in any detail. If you want to use these important technologies in conjunction with XSLT, there are other books that do them justice .