Teaching Materials: A German intro class to XPath and XSLT

Since you all probably already know that I’m a bit short on time but trying to keep this blog alive anyway, I wanted to share some teaching materials today. This is one block of a class given at Vienna University in January 2021. The first blocks by my colleagues contained basic intros to XML and TEI – however, my block contains short videos which quickly summarize the contents. If you have no background at all in XML and TEI, you might want to consider looking for an intro to that first or reading my teaching materials which contain an intro suitable for self-directed learning.

Introducing: My Youtube Channel

I host those videos on my Youtube channel. So far, there isn’t much there – but I might add to it with time. Doing these videos was a lot of work, to be honest, so I’m unlikely to expand the channel much more. There will only be new videos as I need them in teaching. I’ll also host the video from my interview there at some point and maybe some recorded talks.

And: the github repo with my teaching materials

This github repo contains all you need for this class: The links to all the videos, in the subfolder ADDITIONAL-RESOURCES are all the PDFS and, of course, the LaTeX code for the teaching materials in the main folder.

If you find mistakes, please point them out to me (although I probably won’t re-edit the videos, if I even still have them). I’m quite sure there are a few bloopers in those videos 😉

Who is this class for? German-speaking individuals, mostly!

It’s an introductory class to XPath and XSLT which was given in about 5 hours in total (including the practicals). That’s a really short time to learn XPath and XSLT. In that sort of time, all one can do is get a vague overview and play around a little. If you want real command of these technologies, you need to practice and I suggest taking an advanced class or school on it. Also, given the class is in German, it would be helpful if you understood that, obviously 😉

Also, previous knowledge of at least some very basic XML and maybe even TEI would be good. I give the very basic intro in the recap-part of the class, so strictly speaking, it might work for a complete beginner too.

This is the Youtube playlist on my channel with the videos for this class in order.

If you’re interested in these teaching materials, you might also be interested in these pages on the blog:

1. Simple XML to LaTeX Transformation Tutorial
2. Automating XML annotation: Get more done using RegEx Search&Replace and xsl:analyze-string
3. The XML & Annotation category

I hope this is useful to somebody.

Best,

the Ninja