Building Oracle XML Applications

Aimed at Oracle professionals planning or doing XML work, this in-depth guide, covering Oracle8 and Oracle8i, comes from Oracle's lead XML technical evangelist, Steve Muench. No prior knowledge of XML is required to dive into the book, but readers are assumed to be familiar with SQL and with programming using Java or PL/SQL.

Building Oracle XML Applications introduces XML, gives an overview of Oracle XML technologies, and shows what they do and how they fit together. There is a focus on JDeveloper, Oracle's Java and XML development tool, which can be installed from the CD-ROM, and there are plenty of hands-on examples of how to use it. Then there are chapters on processing XML with PL/SQL or Java, transforming XML with XSLT, publishing data with XSQL pages, generating datagrams (XML documents used for exchanging data), and techniques for storing and loading XML data. The final section concentrates on Oracle XML applications, and topics include an XSQL publishing framework, Java extension functions, and using XSQL and XSLT to build personalized portals and discussion forums.

This fast-paced handbook is packed with example code. The presentation is clear, and the technical content is based on the author's deep knowledge of Oracle in general and XML technologies in particular. Highly recommended. --Tim Anderson, Amazon.co.uk