The second edition of Bob Stayton's DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide, covering "all aspects of DocBook XML publishing tools, including installing, using, and customizing the XSL stylesheets and processing tools", is now available in paperback book form.

An E-book (PDF) version of the guide remains available for purchase, as does the HTML version, the full text of which is also available online.

A list of changes made for the second edition is available. This edition adds a significant amount of content to the guide - which was already extremely thorough, with step-by-step instructions on everything from tool setup to customizing output to stylesheet debugging.

Stayton has some first-rate qualifications for authoring such a guide. He's a member of the DocBook Technical Committee at OASIS, responsible for overseeing changes to the DocBook vocabulary itself, and one of the most active contributors to discussions on the docbook-apps mailing list, often tackling questions from new users or following up on bug reports from the field.

Also, along with Jirka Kosek, he's a major contributor to development of the DocBook XSL stylesheets (created by Norm Walsh, who also continues to do principal development on them). Among a variety of bug fixes and smaller enhancements, he's responsible for contributing the implementation of XSLT support for the DocBook Olink element, a sophisticated system that enables relative links to be maintained among rendered DocBook documents -- covered in detail in the book.