How This Book Is Organized (Perl and XML)

0.2. How This Book Is Organized

This book is broken up into ten chapters, as follows:

Chapter 1, "Perl and XML" introduces our two heroes. We also give an XML::Simple example for the impatient reader.

Chapter 2, "An XML Recap" is for the readers who say they know XML but suspect they really don't. We give a quick summary of where XML came from and how it's structured. If you really do know XML, you are free to skip this chapter, but don't complain later that you don't know a namespace from an en-dash.

Chapter 3, "XML Basics: Reading and Writing" shows how to get information from an XML document and write it back in. Of course, all the interesting stuff happens in between these steps, but you still need to know how to read and write the stuff.

Chapter 4, "Event Streams" explains event streams, the efficient core of most XML processing.

Chapter 5, "SAX" introduces the Simple API for XML processing, a standard interface to event streams.

Chapter 6, "Tree Processing" is about . . . well, processing trees, the basic structure of all XML documents. We start with simple structures of built-in types and finish with advanced, object-oriented tree models.

Chapter 7, "DOM" covers the Document Object Model, another standard interface of importance. We give examples showing how DOM will make you nimble as a squirrel in any XML tree.

Chapter 8, "Beyond Trees: XPath, XSLT, and More" covers advanced tree processing, including event-tree hybrids and transformation scripts.

Chapter 9, "RSS, SOAP, and Other XML Applications " shows existing real-life applications using Perl and XML.

Chapter 10, "Coding Strategies" wraps everything up. Now that you are familiar with the modules, we'll tell you which to use, why to use them, and what gotchas to avoid.