Xquery: Kick Start

XQuery Kick Start delivers a concise introduction to the XQuery standard, and useful implementation advice for developers needing to put it into practice. The book starts by explaining the role of XQuery in the XML family of specifications, and its relationship with XPath. The authors then explain the specification in detail, describing the semantics and data model, before moving to examples using XQuery to manipulate XML databases and document storage systems. Later chapters discuss Java implementations of XQuery and development tools that facilitate the development of Web sites with XQuery. This book is up to date with the latest XQuery specifications, and includes coverage of new features for extending the XQuery language.

James McGovern is currently employed as an Enterprise Architect for The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. . He is the coauthor of the best-selling books Java Web Services Architecture (Morgan Kaufmann), Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture (Prentice Hall), and J2EE Bible (Wiley). He has sixteen years of experience in information technology. James is a member of the Java Community Process, and is currently working on Performance Metric Instrumentation (JSR 138) specification. James is a member of the Worldwide Institute of Software Architects, and holds industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco, and Sun. James can be reached at james@xquerykickstart.com

Kurt Cagle was a founding writer and frequent contributor for Fawcette's XML and Web Services Magazine, and has spoken on XSLT, SVG, and XSL-FO issues at more than a dozen conferences in the last five years. Kurt wrote his first book on XML in 1998, was one of the first authors to concentrate on the XSLT 1.0 specification for the Microsoft environment in Sybex's XML Developer's Handbook, and was a contributing author to the best selling Beginning XML for Wrox Press, among thirteen other books. Most recently, he wrote SVG Programming for Apress. He lives in Kirkland, Washington with his wife and two daughters, and writes novels when he isn't writing computer books. Kurt can be reached at kurt@kurtcagle.net.

Per Bothner has a computer science degree from Oslo, Norway and a Ph.D. from Stanford (1988). After graduating, Per worked for Digital and the University of Wisconsin before joining Cygnus in 1991. At Cygnus, he worked on program development tools, including library, compiler and debugger implementation of C++, and Chill. He was the technical leader of Cygnus's Java group from its formation, as well as GCJ (the "GNU Compiler for the Java platform," a Java ahead-of-time compiler based on the GCC suite and runtime environment). GCJ is based on his ideas and includes much of his code. Per is a founding member of the GCC Steering Committee. Per implemented the original STDIO implementation used in Linux, the Emacs terminal emulator term, the original C Preprocessor library, has fixed bugs in XTERM and bash, and has worked on many GNU and other widely used programs. Per also developed Kawa, which compiles Scheme functions on the fly into Java classes. The Kawa framework is also being used to implement other languages, including JEmacs (a Java re-implementation of the Emacs text editor, including support for the Emacs Lisp extension Language) and XQuery. Per can be reached at per@bothner.com.

James Linn is a coauthor of the book Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture (Prentice Hall) and has seven years of experience in software development. He has worked with Java, C++, and MFC. He has a masters degree in biochemistry from the University of CaliforniamdRiverside, and a masters degree in software engineering from Fairfield University. He is a consultant with Hartford Technology Services Company. James can be reached at jim@raptureart.com.

Vaidyanathan Nagarajan is the coauthor of two recent books on Java Technology: Professional EJB (Wrox), and J2EE Bible (Wiley). He has more than six years of experience in information technology. Prior to joining The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. as an enterprise developer, he worked as a consultant to Netscape Professional Services. He holds an MBA from a leading New England business school. He already has a masters degree in mathematics and computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology. His main interests include programming in Java and robotics. Vaidyanathan can be reached at vnathan@msn.com.