Chapter Roadmap

Now that we have presented a high-level concept of XML and Perl, it's time to see some of the tasks that we can accomplish when we combine these two tools. As we mentioned earlier, we will show you how XML and Perl complement each other and make tasks that initially seem to be difficult almost simple (well, at least a lot easier). We're going to discuss XML and Perl, and how they are used together to create portable, powerful, and easily extensible applications.

This chapter covers the concepts and basics of the most popular XML technologies. Each of these technologies is utilized in Perl applications throughout the book, and we provide a working example that clearly illustrates the proper way to use the respective Perl module. Here are the topics that we'll discuss in this chapter:

• What is XML Processing?

• XML Parser Paradigms

• Parsing an XML Document and Extracting Statistics

• Generating XML Documents

• Searching XML Documents

• Transforming XML Documents

• Our First Perl XML Programs

• The Problem: Generating and Parsing an XML Document

• What is XML Processing?