How to learn XML, HTML or for that matter anything in Programming

Over the last several years I continued to buy books on XML and HTML, and all of them went unread. This year I did end up learning both XML and HTML but NOT by reading books but by programming. In my recent hacking & prototyping projects with IOS and OSGi I had to use XML and HTML to exchange information between devices. I had to read and learn how to use NSXMLParser in IOS, it came with an excellent companion guide – “Introduction to Event-Driven XML Programming Guide for Cocoa” which was useful reading. I leveraged the hpple XML parser. Note the real learning came from my own programming, not from the tutorial or examples from books or websites. The real trick to learning XML and HTML was to understand how they are defined by observing the code working, iterating through several failures before I met with success. 

My 2c – yes read a programming, follow tutorials and examples from websites but the real learning comes when you embark on your own project! 

 

Footnotes:

– Google Search, Stack Overflow, Github and many other sites also serve to accelerate your learning only if you understand the solutions put forth by the community and adapt it to your own project. Blind copying never helps!

– Github is awesome!!!

– hpple is a great resource, I learnt the basics from the Ray Wenderlich tutorial: How to parse HTML on IOS by Matt Galloway 

Advertisement