Sebastopol, CA--More powerful and flexible than the web-specific HTML, yet less demanding than SGML, XML is the perfect tool for formatting documents of any level of complexity, from web pages to legal contracts to books. Moreover, XML has proven indispensable for packaging and conveying other sorts of data, making it central to web services such as SOAP and XML-RPC.
Since the Perl programming language was tailor-made for manipulating text and can easily handle almost any other kind of data, few have disputed the fact that Perl and XML are perfectly suited for each other.
"Perl is used for many web servers and applications because of its strong powers of text handling," says Erik Ray, co-author of the new book Perl & XML (O'Reilly, $34.95) "Perl has had database support for many years. But XML has only just started to become well-supported in Perl. The first phase is over, where ad hoc modules like XML::Parser have gone about as far as they can go. Now we are in the second phase, where modules are much better organized and adhere to standards like DOM and SAX. This is a much more useful and promising era for Perl coders."
"Perl & XML" is written for Perl programmers who need to work with XML documents and data. "The biggest problem with Perl and XML is the sheer number of modules which do something XML-related," says Ray. This new book helps untangle CPAN and gives a complete, comprehensive tour of the landscape of Perl and XML, making sense of the myriad of modules, terminology, and techniques. The last two chapters of "Perl & XML" may be the most valuable of all--they give complete examples of XML applications, pulling together all the tools at your disposal.
Additional Resources:
"Perl & XML" is also available on Safari Books Online
More information about the book, including Table of Contents, index, author bios, and samples
Perl & XML
By Erik T. Ray & Jason McIntosh
ISBN 0-596-00205-X, 216 pages, $34.95 (US) $54.95 (CAN)
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