Organization of This Book

This book is organized into two major sections. The first eleven chapters cover a series of increasingly complex topics, with each chapter building on the previous one. These topics include:

• Reading XML using the standard XmlReader implementations

• Writing XML using the standard XmlWriter implementations

• Reading and writing formats other than XML by creating custom XmlReader and XmlWriter implementations

• Manipulating XML using the Document Object Model

• Navigating XML using XPath

• Transforming XML using XSLT

• Constraining XML using W3C XML Schema

• Serializing XML from objects using SOAP and other formats

• Using XML in Web Services

• Reading XML into, and writing XML from, databases with ADO.NET

Each of these chapters is organized in roughly the following manner. I begin each chapter with an introduction to the specification or standard the chapter deals with, and explain when it's appropriate to use the technology covered. Then I introduce the .NET assembly that implements the technology and give examples that illustrate how to use the assemblies.

The remaining nine chapters provide an API reference that gives an in-depth description of each assembly, its types, and their members.