Recommendations on XML Development Resources

[Candle]

I am new to XML development however I want to enhance my skill set. As
a result, I am looking for recommendation for resources to accomplish
this task in the following areas:
- Books / Web Sites / Classes / Any Other Educational Material
- Free applications to process XPaths, XSLT, and etc
- Purchasable development application to process XPaths, XSLT, and etc
(Want to first go with the free stuff and then as things get more
intense eventually invest in an application which has debugging and
etc.)
- Misc. (Any other areas which I might have missed.)

Any comments would be welcomed.

Regards,

R

 

[Joseph Kesselman]

My standard set of useful resources, not in any particular order:

My 2-part article on styling stylesheets for XSLT tracing/debugging:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-styless1/index.html

XSLT Formatting Objects
http://xml.apache.org/fop/

XSL users' mailing list
http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/index.html
And Dave Pawson's excellent XSL FAQ to go with it
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/index.html

Schema developers' mailing list
(e-mail address removed)
See http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xmlschema-dev/
and http://www.w3.org/Mail/Request .

Apache's XML projects, including Xerces (parser) and Xalan (XSLT)
projects
http://xml.apache.org
http://xml.apache.org/mail.html

OASIS XML hub, and the XML-DEV mailing list
http://xml.org
http://xml.org/xml-dev/index.shtml

W3C specifications (the official word on almost anything XML-related,
though generally rather tersely written)
http://www.w3.org/TR

Annotated XML Specification -- it's slightly out of date, but the
explanations of what the spec is actually trying to say, and why, are
an absolutely indispensible resource. Be warned that it may not
display well in older browsers (Netscape 4.75, for example, may have
trouble with it.)
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/axml/axmlintro.html

Document Object Model
http://www.w3.org/DOM/
http://www.w3.org/DOM/faq.html
http://www.w3.org/DOM/MailingList

IBM's XML DeveloperWorks website -- many tutorials and tools.
DeveloperWorks is run as a semi-independent magazine, so not everything
that's published there reflects IBM's official position, but partly for
that reason it's a darned good resource for folks who are trying to
understand all the available alternatives.
http://www.ibm.com/xml

IBM's alphaWorks site -- Early trial versions of tools currently under
development
http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com