I've been experimenting with SPARQL for some time and was lucky enough to have had some training at work on it, but on several occasions when reading Bob DuCharme's Learning SPARQL I found out something that this very powerful language could do that was new to me. The book provides quite a detailed overview of the capabilities of the language and takes the reader right from their first steps in constructing a query through to using it as a data source for programs. The capabilities of both SPARQL 1.0 and 1.1 are covered, with warnings when commands only work in 1.1. If you are looking to take your first steps in learning SPARQL, or maybe you are someone who can already write queries and would like to enhance your skillset, perhaps exploring topics such as creating, updating and validating data then you may well find this book very useful.
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By Liam Green-Hughes, 29 March, 2011
Like most developers I spend a lot of time keeping my skills up to date as new technologies and demands emerge. Recently I have been learning a bit about non-relational databases, specifically CouchDB, to understand what this approach means and how it might be useful. I still have a lot to learn about this technology, but thought it might be interesting to share and reflect on what I have learnt so far. In this post I will attempt to introduce CouchDB, how you use it and some of the concepts involved. I won't be able to show the full capabilities of CouchDB in one post so a lot will be missed out, including some of its more powerful features such as replication, but hopefully it will be a start.