a) I found XSLT itself to be fairly easy to learn, once I got into it.
b) And thinking declaratively in general wasn't a problem.
c) It's figuring out how *to pull data out properly* that is the problem, vis, XPath.

"To pull out data properly" -- this might be one problem,
Most of the time you don't want to "pull" the data out of anything.
Instead, try thinking of the task as *filtering*; you are writing
an expression to describe a condition on the data or a test of
the data (depending on where the expression is used). This is not
extraction, and thinking about it as extraction can get in the way.

That said, yes I too think XPath is the hard part. Syntactically, not
just conceptually. ("Do I use quotes there or not?" as well as "do I have
the right context to do that?")

***Obnoxious avoidable Plug (skip if offended)***
Wendell Piez is teaching an Introduction to XPath 1.0 at
Extreme 2003 in Montreal in August, to help with
getting your head around XPath.
***end plug ***

--Debbie
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Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre               mailto:dalapeyre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9633
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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  Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
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