<pre>
Author/s : Kurt Cagle, Mark Fussel, Nalleli Lopez, Dan Maharry, Rogerio
Saran
Publisher : Wrox
Category : Misc. Java
Review by : Margarita Isayeva
Rating : 8 horseshoes</pre>
XQuery is a high-level, declarative language for querying XML documents. Its importance can be assured by anyone who had to resort to low-level DOM/SAX APIs to mine information out of angle brackets. XQuery's role is planned to be similar to what SQL is for relational data, and in the final account to supersede SQL. The standards haven't reached final status yet, and I did not expect from this book more than translation of the current version of standards into a human language. And in fact, first three chapters do provide such an overview in a very readable form. Considering this is the only book on XQuery available, this would be good enough, yet next two chapters provide further insight. They compare XQuery's capabilities to those of SQL and XSLT, and this introduces new dimensions to the picture. The discussion is practically oriented, it's almost "learning by example" rather than formal definitions or excursions into an underlying theory. The other side of the medal is that the material often overlaps. The last two chapters describe current implementations of XQuery in .NET and
Java Platforms, for those who want to try things out.
Overall, you will get an idea what capabilities can be expected from this new language and how it fits into already existing XML specifications. For any other language, I would ask for more, but this one formally doesn't even exist yet, so I consider my appetite satisfied.
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk