[Exist-open] Is there a tutorial?

[Martin M. <mar...@ma...>]

Is there somewhere a tutorial that takes you through the steps of  
building a simple eXist application from scratch? As I understand it,  
a simple application would include something like the following steps:

1. You write or select one or XML documents
2. You move them into eXist
3.You build an interface that helps to

	a) pull some stuff out of the XML database
	b) format it so that it can be displayed, presumably through a Web  
browser

When you download eXist, you are told that it is an integrated bundle  
and has its own web server. But unless you already know how to use it  
there is absolutely no guidance on what to do with it.

I am an English professor with very limited programming skills, but  
some years ago I taught myself how to use Peter Robinson's Anastasia,  
which, for all I know, would be rather harder to use than eXist once  
you know what to do with it. I was able to learn it because Robinson  
had a very clear user manual that explained what the different parts  
were and then took you through the steps of building a simple  
application that involved the formatting of a set of documents and  
way of querying them.

Once I had done a simple document and grasped the basic workflow it  
was quite simple to extend things. The eXist documentation is quite  
useless from this perspective. It's a little bit like the Anglo-Saxon  
dictionaries published by German philologists in the late nineteenth  
century. The entries were grouped by roots, so you had to know the  
root in order to find anything. But if you know the root, most of the  
time you don't need to look up anything. Unix documentation by and  
large suffers from the same flaw.

Julia Child's cookbooks do not. Mastering the Art of French Cooking  
is a very sophisticated book that takes nothing for granted. If you  
have patience and some intelligence you can follow its master recipes  
with their rigorously stepwise explanation of every discrete  
operation. Once you have that you introduce variation.

A similar example--and somewhere between computers and cooking--is  
the Northwind database in Microsoft Access. I learned quite a bit  
about SQL by working my way through it, because it also had broken  
things down into steps.