XQuery first steps

Just spoiled by my litlle... she actually rules doing the CSS for this blog!  Really like these colors :-)

As for now reading: "XQuery - The XML Query Language".  While I only managed to find two books on the subject that seemed somewhat decent, this one definiately was a good choice.  Michael Brundage (technical lead for XQuery within MS) does a terrific job in explaining these concepts!  This guy really should get a blog up and running as fast as possible!  (If he actually has one, let me know please, couldn't find anything up till now.)

If you're into XML (and you should!), this one's a must read.  I'm confident that XQuery will change the way we (programmaticaly!) deal with XML in a great way.  What SQL is for any RDMBS, XQuery will be for XML. 

"You're not serious, are you?"

Yes I am!! Just check out the MSDN XML Developer Center and take a 10 second look at the two articles on SQL Server 2005 Dare has published over there.  One is more of a feature overview with regards to XML, while the other is a best practices guide.  You'll quickly realise that SQL Server will heavily rely on the XQuery syntax for al kind of XML processing, selections, ... Even better: in the .NET framework 2.0, XQuery will be a first class citizen!!  Just can't wait to get my hands dirty...

First impressions? XQuery has quite a charming syntax.  Almost seems like kind of a blend between a lot of languages!  As an example: prolog expressions use a CSharp like ";" while if-then-else constructs use more of a VB syntax.  Variables seem directly to be taken from the XSLT specs and are written with a dollar sign in front... 

I was very happy to see how all concepts used in XML techologies like: basic XML, XML Schema, XSLT, XPath were carefully taken, reused and integrated into the language!  If you master any of these technologies, you'll definitely benefit from this...

More on this as I make progression in my XQuery journey!