Essentials (and Beyond!) with Lynda

The first couple of videos of the Lynda.com tutorial have been very straightforward, presenting basic information about XML. Once the narrator began talking about XML Related Technologies, though, my eyes started to glaze over. He described the following: XPath, XSLT, XQuery, XPointer, and XLink, all of which he said he would elaborate on later. I’m hoping that it will all become clearer, rather than complicating things in a way that isn’t necessary for my purposes.

He also did an overview of tools that can be used to work with XML, starting with the very simplified Notepad and going up to Adobe Dreamweaver and Altova XMLSpy. Additionally, he showed a free tool from Microsoft called Visual Studio Express. It’s still not clear which tools they use for this course, and what format the exercise files are, so I will wait until they make that more clear to choose which tool I’ll use. I need to take into consideration the fact that I’m working on both Mac and Windows platforms at home and work, respectively, which would rule out Visual Studio Express (at least at home, where I’m watching most of the tutorial videos). He suggested a free program for Mac called BBEdit, and depending on how the tutorials go, that may be what I use most of the time. I also have access to Dreamweaver at home, so that is another possibility, but given that I'm not familiar with it, I'll need to make sure the learning curve isn't too steep.

To comment generally on the experience with Lynda so far, it’s been very enjoyable. The videos are clear and easy to follow, and the narrator does a great job of explaining things just enough to keep up, but not too deeply that you get bored or lost. They’re conveniently split into shorter times, too, so it’s easy to sit down, watch a video or two, and then break to look something up. It’s much less daunting, looking at a run time of a couple minutes as opposed to an hour, even knowing in the back of my head that these tutorials run in full for multiple hours. I’m happy that I gave it a try, and I hope that beyond this project, I’ll be able to use it as a resource for school, work, and even fun!