DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide was published by O’Reilly Media today. The book, authored by Norman Walsh, Chair of the DocBook Technical Committee of OASIS, is the official reference for the standard and includes information about all of the elements and attributes, along with many examples.
One of the most widely used XML schemas, DocBook is ideally suited to technical documentation for software and hardware products and services.
According to author Norman Walsh, “DocBook has been an industry standard schema for a long time. Although it’s used ‘out-of-the box’ by a large number of authors, it’s also customized, sometimes significantly, for documentation projects as well. Building on our foundation of more than a decade of experience, DocBook V5 has been re-factored to use modern schema languages (RELAX NG and Schematron), simplify the schema, and branch into new areas, including publishing, eLearning, and topic-oriented writing.”
XML Press and O’Reilly Media published DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide as a collaboration that highlights the commitment of both publishers to the DocBook standard. DocBook provides a solid base for technical documentation and publishing applications, and has been widely embraced in the open source community for software documentation. The open source XSL style sheets for DocBook make it possible to create html, pdf (through fo), ePub, and a wide variety of help formats and to easily customize all of those output formats.
