What Does This Book Cover?

This book is about staying on the leading edge of a quickly moving set of technologies. As we all know, technology moves at the speed of light, or at least our brain perceives it that way.

XML is new, and although it has been in existence for a few years , it's now beginning to make its way to the mainstream programming community. Everyone is looking to jump on the XML bandwagon. This book shows you how to use XML with Perl and attempts to convince you that Perl should be the tool of choice for XML application development.

A number of technologies and standards are related to XML. Because both XML and Perl are open source technologies, some of the best developers from around the world are contributing to their development. This is what makes it so exciting; anyone can contribute. Bugs are fixed immediately (not on next release) and software is customized toward a programmer's needs (not the other way around). Everyday users have a voice (through mailing lists and newsgroups) in the development of new capabilities and are welcome to contribute to the effort. We hope that this book acts as a traveler 's guide as you set off on your journey, as well as a navigation system if you happen to get lost.

Here are some of the topics covered in this book:

• XML standards

• XML parsing with Perl

  • SAX 1 and 2 modules

  • DOM 1 and 2 modules

  • Other event-driven and in-memory parsers

• Validating XML with Perl

• Generating XML documents with Perl

  • XML writing modules

  • Generating XML from other data formats

• XML transformations with Perl

  • XSLT modules

  • XPath module

  • Other transformations and conversions

• Advanced topics

  • AxKit

  • XML and databases

  • SVG and Perl

• XML web services with Perl

  • SOAP implementation

  • XML-RPC implementation