13. References
One of the things that makes learning DocBook difficult is that
the sites related to it tend to overwhelm the newbie with long lists
of W3C standards, massive exercises in markup theology, and dense
thickets of abstract terminology. We're going to try to avoid that
here by giving you just a few selected references to look at.
Michael Smith's
Take My Advice: Don't Learn XML surveys the XML world from
an angle similar to this document.
Norman Walsh's DocBook: The Definitive
Guide is available in print and
on the
web. This is indeed the definitive reference, but as an
introduction or tutorial it's a disaster. Instead, read this:
Writing
Documentation Using DocBook: A Crash Course. This is an excellent
tutorial.
There is an excellent DocBook FAQ with a lot
of material on styling HTML output. There is also a DocBook wiki.
If you're writing for the Linux Documentation Project, read the
LDP Author Guide.
The best general introduction to SGML and XML that I've
personally read all the way through is David Megginson's Structuring
XML Documents (Prentice-Hall, ISBN: 0-13-642299-3).
For XML only, XML In A
Nutshell by W. Scott Means and Elliotte "Rusty"
Harold is very good.
The XML
Bible looks like a pretty comprehensive reference on XML and
related standards (including Formatting Objects).
Finally, the The XML
Cover Pages will take you into the jungle of XML standards
if you really want to go there.