"Relational" behavior with XML

My favorite is Michael Kay's XSLT : Programmer's Reference, 2nd ed., Wiley Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-7645-4381-4. It's thick (939 pages), it's from one of the authors of XSLT, it's not about FM XML and XSLT, but it's both a general introduction and a reference, it explains every function in-depth with examples and has a large appendix that covers XML and XSLT products. Beverly Voth's book is good for learning, but not as a reference. And it does not cover FMS7A and Custom Web Publishing.

As I have understood, XSLT is a so-called functional language. It works like a mathematical function: y=f(x) (in analogy: output = XSLT(XML input)). It should not matter what you pass as x and in which order you pass x (or a more complicated expression) to the function f, one should always get a result y (sometimes not as expected ). Therefore XSLT is designed to have no side-effects. Hence it's different from other programming languages like C, Java, JavaScript, Fortran and similar, and one has in part to throw overboard some techniques that one has learnt with the languages mentioned.

Examples and techniques are covered in Sal Mangano's XSLT Cookbook, O'Reilly, 2003, ISBN 0-596-00372-2.

A lot of problems and solutions are discussed in the XSLT FAQ.

And then there is this forum here ...

Martin