I have been very busy this week. I was enrolled in a class on XML at Learning Tree International. The official course number was 542. And its true title was "XML: A Comprehensive Hands-On Introduction".To tell the truth, the class was not all that great. I say that considering that the price of the course is $2650. Part of the problem was that our particular instructor was not stellar. This may not be indicative of the Learning Tree in general. I remember much better instructors in the past. This particular instructor was quite a dictator. And the instructor had trouble answering some of the questions correctly. Previous instructors would note down the few questions they did not know the answer for, and produce a correct and comprehensive answer the next day. Our instructor just guessed, came up with wrong answers, or just stated a lack of knowledge. Weak.
My post is to pass on information about the final exam in the class. There were at least 3 different versions of the exam. However I presume they had the same questions, but asked in different orders. I cannot give you the exact questions and answers. However I can share the information you need to know for well over half of the 40 total questions:
- XML elements are case sensitive
- Text in elements are called PCDATA
- The entity for the quote character is "
- Processing instructions are for applications parsing the document
- Well formed XML elements do not overlap
- Namespaces are used to uniquely identify elements/attributes
- The namespace name is the URI (e.g. http://black-of-hat.blogspot.com/)
- The QName is a prefix (alias) plus local part (e.g. boh:HackedElem)
- Elements are better than attributes because they can be duplicated and can have subelements
- The DOM (Document Object Model) is language independent
- Tree based processing is slow
- @name will select the attribute "name" in XPath
- XQuery reformats the XML to another XML format
- DOM getElementsByTagName function always returns a NodeList
- DTD (Document Type Definition) limitation is that they are not in XML format
- The root element in XML Schema is always schema
- XML Schema attribute minOccurs attribute set to 0 means optional
- Complex XML Schema types with required order of contrents is "sequence"
- XPath expressions starting with a slash are absolute paths
- XSL-FO generates PDF format
- Web services is platform independent because it uses the open XML format for messages
- You define SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) services with WSDL
- AJAX is the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML
- You can secure XML via HTTPS
I wrote extensively about my class learning experience in my Software Maintenance blog. There I give an introduction to XML. I also write about XML Parsing. I document XPath and XQuery. We covered XML and Databases, and also the DOM. There is also information on XML Schema and XML Schema types. I have a post dedicated to XSL and XSL-FO. Finally I cover SOA and AJAX.
