[jwa]

The code fragments in these books are delimited with //: and //:- and there are no errors because these markers are used to verify that the code works using other production tools. I suspect that the C++ books use a similar technique.

There are other code fragments in-line but these do not concern me for now. I don't want to discuss the merits, I just want to be able to grok the calibre design enough to tinker on my own.

I thought that the use of XPath implied that there would be XSLT in the black box. I guess I was mistaken to assume that.

I am reading platform.py at the moment as the existing manual seems to suffer from being written by someone who understands the entire context all ready. That is not intended in a negative way as I hope to be constructive here. It is hard to distance yourself enough from internals to explain things succinctly. Good prose is very hard to write. Good technical prose is almost impossible. That is the thing I like most about Eckel's writing.