XQuery book recommendation

Now and then I'm asked for advice on XQuery books. There are two books I strongly recommend these days.

The first is XQuery from Priscilla Walmsley.

Priscilla is an excellent writer, and known for teaching good XML and XQuery classes, she is also the author of the FunctX XQuery function library.

It's good to have some basic XML knowledge to start reading, but you don't need to be an expert. Especially for some of the more advanced topics, think of XML namespaces, it's useful to have some introductional material. On the other hand, the book is also good reading for the more experienced XQuery developers and architects.

25 chapters on specific topics, and a summary of all built-in functions and types, make it also a good reference. This is not the kind of book you buy and read only once.

My second recommendation is XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference from the hand of Michael Kay. I guess there is no need to introduce Michael.

Right, this is an XPath book, but remember that XPath 2.0 is a subset of XQuery 1.0 and they share the same data model, XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model.

As you can expect from Michael, this is an extremely in depth book. Not a tutorial, but an authoritative reference. If you're serious about XQuery development, this is a must have!

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