XML is one of today’s most important technologies—it is supported natively by many databases, and technologies, and there are few alternatives when you’re faced with the need for a powerful data medium transferable across any application and platform. And since XML files are compact and text-based, it is the perfect data medium for delivering data on to the Internet. XML has been around for many years, and there have been a few best-selling Java/XML drill down books in the past, so what makes this book different? Well, a lot of the competitors out there are large tomes, and are very old now; this book assumes a different approach, showing that you can give the reader all they need to know to hit the ground running, without making them trawl through hundreds of pages of syntax. The book is also bang up-to-date, looking at all the newest XML standards (DOM 3.0, XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0) and Java tools (including JAXB, Xerces2-j, JAXP, XML Beans, and many more,) and the latest features of Java 5 and 6 are covered where appropriate. In short, the reader is given all they need to master cutting edge XML development with Java.