October 2008
Beginner to intermediate
208 pages
3h 1m
English
Text is often the most natural way to represent information for presentation and editing by people. However, the ability to extract that information for use by software has been an arcane art practiced only by the most advanced developers. The success of XML is evidence that there is significant demand for using text to represent information—this evidence is even more compelling considering the relatively poor readability of XML syntax and the decade-long challenge to make XML-based information easily accessible to programs and stores. The emergence of simpler technologies like JSON and the growing use of meta-programming facilities in Ruby to build textual domain specific languages (DSLs) such as ...