Organization of the Book (XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition)

0.3. Organization of the Book

Part I, introduces you to the fundamental standards that form the essential core of XML to which all XML applications and software must adhere. It teaches you about well-formed XML, DTDs, namespaces, and Unicode as quickly as possible.

Part II, explores technologies that are used mostly for narrative XML documents, such as web pages, books, articles, diaries, and plays. You'll learn about XSLT, CSS, XSL-FO, XLinks, XPointers, XPath, and RDDL.

One of the most unexpected developments in XML was its enthusiastic adoption for data-heavy structured documents such as spreadsheets, financial statistics, mathematical tables, and software file formats. Part III, explores the use of XML for such record-like documents. This part focuses on the tools and APIs needed to write software that processes XML, including SAX, DOM, and schemas.

Finally, Part IV, is a series of quick-reference chapters that form the core of any Nutshell Handbook. These chapters give you detailed syntax rules for the core XML technologies, including XML, DTDs, schemas, XPath, XSLT, SAX, and DOM. Turn to this section when you need to find out the precise syntax quickly for something you know you can do but don't remember exactly how to do.