OmniMark Programming Principles

www.serverside.com.au

Preface

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Overview
'OmniMark Programming Principles' is a short expository book which introduces the reader to the OmniMark programming language. It contains discussion and examples of many of OmniMark's features but is not intended as a complete or definitive reference.

Comprehensive and official online documentation for the language is available at www.omnimark.com, as is the language software itself and a vast collection of resources for it. However, the official documentation is of most use to programmers who already have an understanding of the way OmniMark works.

It is the aim of this book to provide introductory and tutorial material which may help beginners to recognise and use some of the very powerful and elegant features OmniMark provides. As the name implies, I have, where possible, highlighted the 'principles' involved in using OmniMark.

Target Audience
The book has been written mainly as an additional resource for my students studying my subject 'Advanced SGML and XML' at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia, but any reader with a need to process SGML or XML data, or who requires a general purpose, pattern matching and file-processing language, will hopefully find the material useful.

The book should be readable by any person with elementary programming experience or skills in any language.

Contents and structure
The book appears here together with this preface and a chapter summary. The chapters are presented in web-page form with each as a separate document. The sample programs shown in the work have their names linked to separate files containing the code to make it easy to view or download them.

If you have the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) version of OmniMark installed on your machine, clicking any code sample link may well invoke it. An alternative to this is to configure your browser to accept all xom files with the mime type text/plain so that the code samples can be viewed, copied or saved directly to your file system.

A printed and bound version of the book is currently being prepared and will be accompanied by a disk containing all the sample programs and the data files which are used in the examples. Please contact me for further information if this printed version is of interest.

Feedback
I welcome any general comments or suggestions about the material, its presentation, accuracy and readability. Please send me email at the address below.

You are welcome to place a link to this site in your own pages if you wish, and I'd appreciate hearing about it if you do.