Folks,
I have got to work with a new team and design the required skills for each of them, I want to put a compressed training plan for one of them to be the Xml Expert in the team, as part of this I put him to read about XPath, XSLT from W3Schools, but what else he needs to know ? or is there a better source ?
Do you really want one person to be the XML expert ? Or otherwise split the expertise up. What happens when he's on holiday, or ill, or leaves the company ?
When I'm coding, I'm having to switch seamlessly between the code (Java) domain, databases, XML and network issues. To have to delegate to different team members is going to be non-productive at best.
I think you're much better off training the whole team up in the required technologies. That way they can all work towards delivering solutions, and not be dependent on one particular person.
Some points are
http://www.xml.com/ is another good source too.
Start with Unicode. Sounds silly but you can't get far in XML until you understand what "encoding" or "charset" means. Know what data you can put in an XML document and what you can't. This includes escaping special characters and handling of whitespace.
All the other technologies can be interesting but that depends entirely on what you need later. If you need complex processing of XML, XSLT will only get in your way. XSLT is meant only for very simple tasks like renaming elements, filtering XML and such. While you can do everything with XSLT, you can do the same with a real programming language in a tenth of the time (and it will be maintainable).
So unless you give some more specific information what this team member should be able to do, it's hard to give good further advice.
What does 'design the required skills' mean? What is a 'compressed training plan'? What is your definition / interpretation of the word 'expert'?
Are you going to give this 'expert' person more money for expending the effort to gain expert skills?
It's not a question of 'what else he needs to know', it is matter of testing the understanding of what is read with solving problems using what has been read. Not only this, but one has to read large amounts of existing XML, XSD and XSLT to gain an appreciation of the problems confronted in this domain and the idioms and patterns that are used to solve those problems. It is questionable if this can be achieved within a compressed training plan.