By Priscilla Walmsley
First Edition
March 2007
Pages: 510
ISBN 10: 0-596-00634-9 |
ISBN 13: 9780596006341
(Average of 1 Customer Reviews)
XQuery delivers a carefully paced tutorial that goes into the final 1.0 standard in detail. The book delves into critical advanced issues such as data typing and designing efficient query logic. Whether you're coming from SQL, XSLT, or starting from scratch, you'll learn about XQuery's support for filtering, sorting, and grouping data, as well as how to use FLWR expressions, XPath, and XQuery tools for extracting and combining information.
Full Description
With the XQuery 1.0 standard, you finally have a tool that will make it much easier to search, extract and manipulate information from XML content stored in databases. This in-depth tutorial not only walks you through the XQuery specification, but also teaches you how to program with this widely anticipated query language.
XQuery is for query writers who have some knowledge of XML basics, but not necessarily advanced knowledge of XML-related technologies. It can be used both as a tutorial, by reading cover to cover, and as a reference, by using the comprehensive index and appendixes. Either way, you will find the background knowledge in namespaces, schemas, built-in types and regular expressions that is relevant to writing XML queries. This book provides:
- A high-level overview and quick tour of XQuery
- Information to write sophisticated queries, without being bogged down by the details of types, namespaces, and schemas
- Advanced concepts for users who want to take advantage of modularity, namespaces, typing and schemas
- Guidelines for working with specific types of data, such as numbers, strings, dates, URIs and processing instructions
- A complete alphabetical reference to the built-in functions and types
You will also learn about XQuery's support for filtering, sorting, and grouping data, as well as how to use FLWOR expressions, XPath, and XQuery tools for extracting and combining information. With this book, you will discover how to apply all of these tools to a wide variety of data sources, and how to recombine information from multiple sources into a single final output result.
Whether you're coming from SQL, XSLT, or starting from scratch, this carefully paced tutorial takes you through the final 1.0 standard in detail.
Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon
Featured customer reviews
Clever introduction, comprehensive reference, all round solid work., April 29 2008
This is a good title for those interested in XQuery. The author takes pains to keep the subject matter apposite. Each chapter restricts itself to a narrow subset of XQuery before moving on, thus resisting the temptation to branch out into other features which might labour the reader.
Perhaps more focus could have been given to individual implementations, as Saxon is given undue prominence as the implementation of choice. However, this is probably being a little fussy, as most readers will have an implementation in mind before even considering a text on XQuery (if they don't, they should).
There are plenty of other titles which would benefit greatly from following this title's general approach.
Media reviews
"There is a lot of information contained in XQuery and it is obvious that Priscilla Walmsley both knows her topic, and is quite clear, concise and well versed on presenting the information in a logical style. While the book is aimed at the XQuery novice, it's usefulness as a desk reference makes it one of those books that you get to learn the topic, but keep forever."
-- T. Michael Testi, Blogcritics.org
"Overall, I am really pleased with this book. I've read some other on the same topic and they were either not as compact or not focused enough. The material available in this book clearly illustrates how the author master the XQuery language and give plenty of information usually needed for real-world projects, through some XQuery functions which should have been added to the language. I have personally used this book for a real-world project dealing with lots of XML documents and it has proved to be really useful. The companion website is also a must-have when developing XQuery functions."
-- Jérôme Bernard, JavaLobby
