Are there ANY good XML tutorials? Has there ever been a good one written?

[StageLeft]

I'm trying to get a grasp of XML, again. I've tried at least twice in the past interspersed by about 6 months each. I can find tutorial after tutorial. ALL of them cover the same basic crap: Tags, elements, well formedness. Then at the end they say how it will revolutionize the world.

Of course i've found only one half-assed attempt at actually showing me something I can _do_ with XML. All these tutorials promote the same old drivel but it seems that nobody who writes them actually knows how to do anything with XML.

Anybody here know of any tutorials that are useful or do I have to buy a book? :|

 

[DAM]

man if you find one let me know, although i dont really want to know XML, accroding to infoworld its supposed to be the way the net world is going and i just want to see what the hell all the hype is about.






dam(nef! :--P)

 

[StageLeft]

:|

 

[DAM]

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dam(look ma no hands)

 

[gopunk]

msdn has some good stuff, though i find the site generally hard to navigate.

 

[StageLeft]

<< msdn has some good stuff, though i find the site generally hard to navigate. >>

I gave them a go but i find all of their tutorials exceedingly boring. They are very impersonal and I just can't read their stuff. I've been going through a bunch of stuff at xml101.com - it's not too bad and has some real material.

 

[yoda291]

I find it helps to think of it this way. Think of XML kinda like HTML. No one but a hardcore techie power nerd emga brain is gonna know ALL the tags and ALL the attributes and ALL the nuances of coding it. It' s a language that's there for the SOLE purpose of describing a document in a neat and organized manner. Ergo, if you ever want to synchronize data from 4 different web sites and ...say...a SQL database, it's loads easier if everyone followed your definitions. Well formedness is not an option in xml, so that's not really a problem.

So think of it this way. XML has a rather specific use which lends itself to be very handy in a multitude of situations....but it isn't the end all/be all of web development. Thinking of it that way, there really isn't all that much to learn about XML. Once you figure out how to author documents, make your DtDs, pass them in/out of whatever apps you use, there isn't a whole lot past that. So don't feel disheartened...you're well on your way and all you really need is some practice.

Come to think of it, it's an awful lot like the game Othello. Minutes to learn, a lifetime to master.

 

[Descartes]

<< No one but a hardcore techie power nerd emga brain is gonna know ALL the tags and ALL the attributes and ALL the nuances of coding it. >>



Actually, knowing ALL the tags and ALL the attributes and ALL the nuances of an extensible markup is really easy



<< make your DtDs >>



Antiquated, XSD is the "in thing."



<< All these tutorials promote the same old drivel but it seems that nobody who writes them actually knows how to do anything with XML. >>



No one is going to tell you how to do anything with XML, that's going to be up to you. XML is an active constituent of "web services." Many industries have formalized a vocabulary for B2B solutions, it's used as a more friendly application configuration format, it's used as a means to serialize datasets and marshall them across heterogeneous platforms, ad nauseum. The key is to know when to not use XML, because you can almost find a fit for it anywhere.

I'd say just buy a book on XML from O'Reilly. It's better than scouring the internet looking for poorly written tutorials, parsing through all the marketing propaganda in an effort to find the tiniest bit of technical merit.

 

[Descartes]

Thought I'd give you an example of how I used XML in the past...

There are other ways to accomplish what I had done in the past, but it worked great at the time.

In a traditional Windows DNA architecture, you have at least 3 tiers, the only notable one in this discussion being the presentation layer. In the past, I delt almost strictly with ASP being used as the presentation layer, to eliminate the headache of desktop deployment. We built an e-commerce framework which served up data from disparate backoffice systems (Great Plains, Southware, MAS90, etc.). This data was consolidated into a central repository (SQL Server, but the data access layer abstracted that, so it could have been Oracle as well). The data was retrieved from the datastore using SQL Server 2k's native XML capabilities, and it was then marshalled across tiers. The presentation layer would simply retrieve this XML data, apply an XSLT stylesheet based on the client platform (web browser, wap device, whatever), and render it, dynamically.

Now this is rather passe, as there are more efficient means to accomplish the same goals, but it hadn't really been done at the time, and it was fun.

 

[StageLeft]

Thanks for replies!

going through xml101.com I've finally come upon some real world examples on what to do. I'm working on a mini-project with a guy at work who has done XML a bit so i can come to him with any crazy questions too. I'm finally getting to the point, i think, where I can actually understand the point of XML and what's going on. I plan on spending tomorrow gunning through it again and then if I drain off xml101.com's info and a fat chapter in some asp book we have I'll have to go and buy an XML book.

We're both on the bench so we were given a "make work" project which we plan to deploy to the employee site anyway and we're just trying to pick up .net and throw in XML for sh*ts and giggles and whatever else we can throw in.

Of course descartes posts always make me feel inadequate