Things you should know in advance
In order to start working with XML, you should of course have a fair idea of what XML is about. It is not necessary to know all the nitty-gritty details, but you should know tags, elements, attributes and DTDs.
Since I can't tell what your background is, I guess it is best not to try to teach you the core XML features here. I will try to give you some links to useful documentation and articles. Then it's up to you, how much you want to know before you start with the iXML library...
There are quite a few Web sites out there that collect and provide tons of XML related documents. The ones you should probably take a look at are
· XML.com
XML is a standard. Maybe that's the most important fact about XML. It therefore makes sense to point you to the documents describing the standard. They can all be found at the Web site of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards that should interest you most are
· Feb 1998: W3C Recommendation: Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0
· Oct 1998: W3C Recommendation: Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 Specification
The XML Recommendation describes the core XML standard. Be prepared to find some very technical information about the syntax and semantics of the XML language. The DOM 1.0 Recommendation specifies a representation of the content and structure of an XML document in terms of classes and interfaces. This allows programs to get access to the data in an XML document in a programmatic way and without doing the low-level bytestream-oriented things themselves. Be aware though that the DOM Recommendation only specifies the classes and interfaces on a conceptual level. The Recommendation has then to be bound to a particular programming language and environment which requires some freedom in choosing an appropriate mapping. You will sooner or later find out if you take a look at the iXML implementation (which tries to stay close to the Recommendation).