Originally posted by Pauline McNamara:
I went to high school (BLS) with a guy named David Mercer, could you be the same?
Now for a real question regarding your book - how do you define a "beginner", or what else might one need to know to benefit the most from "XML: A Beginner's Guide"?
Thanks,
Pauline
Hi Pauline,
I don't think so; I used to think my name was fairly unique but not anymore. Thanks for asking, though
.
That's really a tough question, because as we've built the series we've struggled with how to define Beginner. It's a moving target, but I think of a person as a beginner when they can use a computer for the basics but are new to programming anything. However, I would say it takes a logical mind. One thing I find about code is it all becomes more and more familiar the longer you work with it (even new languages all seem to contain similar structures and functions). So if you can make mental associations about code from the
patterns, you're probably in the right profession.
I also tend to think of beginners as folks who have taken the time to look behind Web pages at the HTML, and even begin to see the patterns in the HTML that relate to what they're seeing in the browser, even if they're not understanding the code too well. Playing around with HTML/XHTML is very good for going on to learning XML.
Hope this helps a bit, and thanks for the questions.