With the XQuery 1.0 standard, you finally have a tool that will make it much easier to search, extract and manipulate information from XML content stored in databases. This in-depth tutorial not only walks you through the XQuery specification, but also teaches you how to program with this widely anticipated query language.

XQuery is for query writers who have some knowledge of XML basics, but not necessarily advanced knowledge of XML-related technologies. It can be used both as a tutorial, by reading cover to cover, and as a reference, by using the comprehensive index and appendixes. Either way, you will find the background knowledge in namespaces, schemas, built-in types and regular expressions that is relevant to writing XML queries. This book provides:

• A high-level overview and quick tour of XQuery

• Information to write sophisticated queries, without being bogged down by the details of types, namespaces, and schemas

• Advanced concepts for users who want to take advantage of modularity, namespaces, typing and schemas

• Guidelines for working with specific types of data, such as numbers, strings, dates, URIs and processing instructions

• A complete alphabetical reference to the built-in functions and types

You will also learn about XQuery's support for filtering, sorting, and grouping data, as well as how to use FLWOR expressions, XPath, and XQuery tools for extracting and combining information. With this book, you will discover how to apply all of these tools to a wide variety of data sources, and how to recombine information from multiple sources into a single final output result.

Whether you're coming from SQL, XSLT, or starting from scratch, this carefully paced tutorial takes you through the final 1.0 standard in detail.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 10 Ratings

Great book - 2009-10-22
Reviewer Rating:
I had to learn XQuery and XForms in a rather limited time and this book helped me immensely. It has a very clear introduction, which gets you going and the rest of the chapters are sufficiently detailed to be useful. Very clear, full of code snippets. I wish a similar book was available for xForms :(

I'm using xquery within the eXist database and the code from this book work with eXist.

Solid book - 5 stars - 2009-05-31
Reviewer Rating:
Excellent reference - I don't do any BDB XML work without it. The website has a ton of useful XQuery functions too. Outstanding work!

Great X-Query book but needs more information. - 2008-03-15
Reviewer Rating:
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.

decent and worth having... but nothing more - 2008-03-11
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Good XQuery tutorial/reference - 2008-01-29
Reviewer Rating:
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.

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