We recommend to have a look at the Quick Start first, then maybe continue to read about XQuery support, in particular eXist-specific extensions and features.
| Quick Start: | getting started with eXist. |
| Ant Tasks: | how to automate tasks with Ant. |
| Backup and Restore: | explains how to backup/restore your database contents. |
| Building eXist: | compiling and building eXist distributions, using the Subversion repository. |
| Changes: | detailed list of changes. |
| Cluster configuration: | how to configure cluster environment. |
| Configuring Indexes: | how to configure specific indexes. |
| Deployment: | eXist supports different alternatives for server deployment. |
| Developer's Guide: | describes the various interfaces: XML:DB API, XML-RPC, REST, SOAP. |
| Developer's Notes: | a few notes on how to use the various tools; SVN, eclipse, Ant, PMD, JDepend, ... |
| Java Admin Client: | describes command-line usage of the Java client |
| LDAP Security Manager: | configuring eXist to use LDAP for users and groups. |
| Security: | creating/changing users, passwords and resource permissions. |
| Server Configuration: | configuration options for the server. |
| WebDAV: | how to setup your favourite webDAV enabled application. |
| Atom Publishing Protocol: | how to configure and interact over the Atom Publishing Protocol to treat your collections as Atom feeds. |
| XACML: | xQuery access control. |
| XInclude: | xInclude support in eXist. |
| XQuery: | current status, supported features and extensions. |
| XQuery Update Extensions: | eXist provides a number of extensions to update document fragments from within an XQuery. |
Further documentation can be found in the Wiki. Among other things, have a look at:
An up-to-date list of articles can be found on the wiki.
If you would like to know more about the internal workings of eXist, you may read the following introductory article:
Wolfgang Meier. Index-Driven XQuery Processing in the eXist XML Database. Paper presented at XML Prague 2006. Presentation slides can be found here as well.
An older article is:
Wolfgang Meier. eXist: An Open Source Native XML Database. In: Akmal B. Chaudri, Mario Jeckle, Erhard Rahm, Rainer Unland (Eds.): Web, Web-Services, and Database Systems. NODe 2002 Web- and Database-Related Workshops, Erfurt, Germany, October 2002. Springer LNCS Series, 2593.
A chapter about eXist is also contained in the book:
Akmal B. Chaudri, Awais Rashid, Roberto Zicari (Eds.): XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems. ISBN: 0-201-84452-4. Published by Addison Wesley Professional, March, 2003.
