Lucas R. Vogel said
Excellent reference - I don't do any BDB XML work without it. The website has a ton of useful XQuery functions too. Outstanding work!
Speedlearner said
The problem of this book is it doesn't give detailed information on how to implement X-Query on your computer. When you have Windows Vista, eXist doesn't work. Neither does WAMP. And unless you have heavy duty experience with SQL Server, this book is useless. The author of this book needs to include many more simple examples so that people like me can use the language. I might figure out how to use this someday, but it will be a long time before I do. That is so disappointing.
J. Brutto said
I did find this book extremely useful and have used it as my definitive reference for XQuery while working with real-world problems. The book was not only informative, comprehensive and filled with useful and easy to follow examples, but also realistic. You will find that any of the basic questions you have can be answered somewhere in this book (of course advanced questions often rely on the specific implementation, which is out of scope for the book and I recommend you hit online resources for those).
I do recommend reading/buying/using this book in your day-to-day work with XML in cooperation with an XQuery implementation. It's a little dry of information for advanced readers, but novice to intermediate readers will find it amazingly helpful.
However... this book has one major shortcoming: it is horribly written and organized.
The book seems to be written in a manner where the author knew exactly what they were talking about but didn't take the time to organize it or write a second and third draft. It feels like a "once-and-done" text and is inconsistent with coverage between all the various topics (for example: the structure of simple path queries is discussed sporadically while simple work with sorting and grouping is gone into a level of overkill in detail).
Good book to have on your shelf (just like the little SQL, Vi, Regex, etc. booklets we all have), but you've definitely got to break out the PostIt Notes to make sure you can find the information throughout the book.
It definitely needs more information here and there, but it's a great place to (at the least) start off and look for basic information.
Dan Arias said
I needed to come up to speed with an XML database server (Mark Logic) and I found this book very useful for learning how to use XQuery. It was concise and provided many good examples. The presentation of chapters was somewhat episodic--you had to read the later chapters to find out how some of the topics turned out. This was probably due to the newness and complexity of the topic. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a chapter reorg for the 2nd edition.
In my case, the book covers only XQuery and does not cover the XQuery extensions and specifics of the XML database system I was using. Walmsley's book makes a great companion to the vendor documentation.
Data Guy said
This is a nice, comprehensive book written by someone highly qualified to talk about XQuery. The author, Priscilla Walmsley, was a member of the W3C XML Schema Working Group.
Now that XML is being added to database management systems, DBAs and database developers will need to know how to query that data. And they'll more than likely be using XQuery to do it. As such, this book would be a good way for database professionals to gain expertise on XQuery.
Walmsley's book offers a concise, yet in-depth tutorial on the XQuery language specification. After digesting these 25 chapters you'll have the knowledge required to program using XQuery to read your XML data. Whether you're coming from a relational and SQL background or you're an XML and XSLT coder, this well-written text will help you understand and write queries using XQuery.
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