XQuery: The XML Query Language

This is simply a great introduction to XQuery. In general this is a book rich on examples. I used this to test every other query, and gain a more thorough understand of the particular topic. The best way to learn a new language is to practice - right ? Besides the examples bit, I think this is a well written book that explains the more academic content in straight forward manner. About half of the book is references, which has a lot of examples. My personal favorite section is the "Idioms" part of Chapter 10 that gives some clever solutions that I wouldn't have come up with myself.