Re: [xml-dev] xml, books

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

I always recommend to people in seminars that they wait for
(three to) five years from when a technology is introduced to when they
adopt it for any mission-critical uses.

XML could be used straight away because SGML was already mature.
XSL could be pretty much used right away because it was DSSSL 2 with
different brackets.

But XML Schemas, XQuery and the capitalized Web Services systems
cannot because the specifications are pioneering new ground. On that 
reckoning,
they will only go mainstream in 2 (for WXS) to 5 (for XQuery etc) years 
time.
By that time, the punters really will have figured out whether MS Infopath,
XML databases, RDF, non-updating XQuery, etc. really provide any novelty or
advantage.

When the XML Schemas spec was delayed, I remember someone claiming that
it was responsible for popping the .COM bubble, because so many 
companies had
based their optimistic claims on piggybacking on the Schema-lead brave 
new world.
How bogus can you get? The idea that the world is full of CIOs ready to 
throw away
all their existing systems in favour of unproven or imature new 
technologies, however
well-thought-out or conquering, is mad. Perhaps the big initial interest 
in XML was
not the sign of a new permanent wave, but a dam bursting for people as 
something
fairly fundamental (exchanging trees in text) suddenly became available.

So if there is diminished interest, that probably shows that people are 
being prudent,
and waiting for implementations to mature.  Maybe this shows another 
fallacy of
the .COM idea that companies should expect expotential growth: prudence by
users will delay the takeoff. But it doesn't show that the technologies 
have failed:
we need to be realistic and even encouraging of the prudence of adopters.

If I think about the books I regularly use, I come up with:
 * O'Reilly's XML Pocket Reference or the XPath/Xpointer book
 * O'Reilly's CJKV Information processing by Ken Lunde
 * Manning's Swing book
 * O'Reilly's SAX 2 book
 * Unicode standard
and pretty much all the rest is online.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe