This tutorial, as well as the first DocBook release of the CLP User Guide, were written using the Emacs editor. Most any text editor will do as a DocBook editor, but Emacs has its advantages. First, naturally, Emacs is Open Source. Second, there are Emacs modes tailored for editing XML documents which provide features such as syntax highlighting. One such mode is PGSML, which may be part of a system's default Emacs configuration (this appears to be the case with Cygwin, at the very least).

As the size of a DocBook project grows, so does the time it takes to transform it to HTML. If one wishes to simply check the validity of a document rather than wait for the entire HTML generation process to complete, the validating parser called by xmlto is easy enough to use:

If there are no errors in the document, the parser will terminate without any explicit output. If there is in fact an error, a (sometimes) helpful error message will be printed by the parser.

With DocBook, as is the case with any other computer language, it is easiest to learn by example. The existing examples which are part of CLP are this tutorial, of course, and the User Guide itself. The Selfdocbook (XML Edition) is also an excellent example, as it is a DocBook document which includes its own source. Note that the source of this tutorial is available from the COIN CVS repository in the COIN/Clp/Docs/Howto directory.

The DocBook community is quite active, so the official mailing lists are highly recommended. See the section called “Resources” for more information on the lists as well as a number of other helpful resources.