XML at Learning Tree

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:
  1. XML elements are case sensitive
  2. Text in elements are called PCDATA
  3. The entity for the quote character is "
  4. Processing instructions are for applications parsing the document
  5. Well formed XML elements do not overlap
  6. Namespaces are used to uniquely identify elements/attributes
  7. The namespace name is the URI (e.g. http://black-of-hat.blogspot.com/)
  8. The QName is a prefix (alias) plus local part (e.g. boh:HackedElem)
  9. Elements are better than attributes because they can be duplicated and can have subelements
  10. The DOM (Document Object Model) is language independent
  11. Tree based processing is slow
  12. @name will select the attribute "name" in XPath
  13. XQuery reformats the XML to another XML format
  14. DOM getElementsByTagName function always returns a NodeList
  15. DTD (Document Type Definition) limitation is that they are not in XML format
  16. The root element in XML Schema is always schema
  17. XML Schema attribute minOccurs attribute set to 0 means optional
  18. Complex XML Schema types with required order of contrents is "sequence"
  19. XPath expressions starting with a slash are absolute paths
  20. XSL-FO generates PDF format
  21. Web services is platform independent because it uses the open XML format for messages
  22. You define SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) services with WSDL
  23. AJAX is the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML
  24. 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.