How-to, example-rich book for XQuery written by the Technical Lead for XML Query Processing at Microsoft. A tutorial for developers who need to learn how to work with XQuery; an excellent reference to XQuery expressions for those who are already using the language. Written by Michael Brundage--a Microsoft insider who has worked with XQuery since its conception. Currently, there are no other competing XQuery tutorials/references suitable for both beginners and experts. This book will be for XQuery what The Java Programming Language is for Java- a complete description of the language, suitable for both beginners and experts. This book is what you need to understand the basic design goals of XQuery and its application in real-world development. It provides solid coverage of XQuery, and is appropriate as a tutorial and a reference. The W3C specification is dense, poorly written, very formal and abstract, and does not contain many examples--exactly what you'd expect from a formal specification. Consequently, developers are starving for information about and examples of XQuery. Because the formal specifications are most people's only source of information about the standards, and because they are so difficult to absorb and internalize, other developers and programmers are at a distinct disadvantage. Anyone who wants to know what a particular XQuery expression is supposed to do, or how to accomplish a particular task using XQuery, will turn to this book. Its many examples make it very accessible.