Two recent books - Michael Kay's XSLT Programmer's Reference and Tony Graham's Unicode: A Primer - shed light on some complicated but critical aspects of XML document creation and processing.

Michael Kay's XSLT Programmer's Reference (Wrox - ISBN 1-861003-12-9) is a a dense block of a book with more examples than just about anything else I've seen. The introduction is clear and friendly, and does a great job of explaining how XSLT fits in XML development. Guiding principles get thorough attention before we leap into the main body of reference material and explanation. (It also get points for covering the final W3C spec exclusively, not muddying the waters with the older MSXSL version.)

Tony Graham's Unicode: A Primer (M&T Books/IDG - ISBN 0-7645-4625-2) is an explanation of Unicode written in much plainer English than the specification, with lots of attention to implementation detail. I'm very happy to see that it includes both discussions of the specification and its complexities and an overview of support for that specification in various environments - operating systems, Internet technologies (XML, HTTP, HTML, and SGML), programming languages, and fonts. The reference material is useful without duplicating the specification.

This story was originally a posting to XML-Dev.