What s in This Book?

What's in This Book?

This book is intended to cover all of XPath 1.0 and the current working draft of XPath 2.0. XPath 1.0 is an established recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and as of this writing, XPath 2.0 is in W3C working draft form. We're going to work from the most basic to the fairly advanced in both these specifications.

The first half of this book is dedicated to XPath 1.0, and the second to XPath 2.0. You won't need any programming skills to work with XPath in this bookyou will, however, need a basic knowledge of HTML and XML.

Here's an overview of some of the topics we'll see in this book:

• How XPath fits in with XML

• The XPath 1.0 and 2.0 syntax

• Using XPath and XSLT to transform XML

• Using XPath in XSLT match patterns

• XML Schemas and the XML Information Set

• Nodes

• Expressions

• Literals

• Variables

• Parenthesized expressions

• Function calls

• Comments

• Paths

• Axes

• Axis steps

• Node tests

• General steps

• Step qualifiers

• Predicates

• Unabbreviated and abbreviated XPath syntax

• Handling node-sets in code

• XPath operators

• Node-set functions

• String functions

• Boolean functions

• Number functions

• Using XLink and XPointer

• Creating simple and complex links

• Using XPath inside XQuery

• Differences between XPath 2.0 and XPath 1.0

• Sequences

• Working with data types

• Logical expressions

• For expressions

• Conditional expressions

• Quantified expressions

• Constructors, functions, and operators on numbers

• Constructors

• The many new XPath 2.0 functions

As you can see, we've got a great deal of XPath coverage planned for this bookboth XPath 1.0 and 2.0.