Learning XSLT

Chapter 18. Parting Words

It’s time for us to part company. If you have read the whole book, I trust you are fairly competent using XSLT and XPath by now. You should be proud of yourself for sticking with it to the end.

Whatever the case, this book is only an introduction to XSLT and XPath. You can now branch out and discover or rediscover some additional resources that are available for these technologies. Some of these I have mentioned before, but it will be nice to present all these resources in one place for your convenience. Here’s the list:

XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0

This is the original XSLT recommendation from the W3C. You’ll find it at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt. It first appeared in November 1999, and it is under 100 pages long.

XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0

This concise little XPath recommendation is at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath. It was introduced on the same day as the XSLT spec.

XSL Transformations (XSLT) 2.0

Here is XSLT 2.0 in working draft form, available at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20. It is over twice as long as the original XSLT 1.0 spec, but it offers plenty of new features.

XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0

The latest working draft of the 2.0 specification is available at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20. Like the XSLT 2.0 draft, it is considerably longer than its predecessor, and packed with all kinds of new features, not all of which are certain to make it into the final recommendation.

Michael Kay’s XSLT Programmer’s Reference, Second Edition