XSLT isn't quite as bad as it looks at first glance. I haven't seen the O'Reily book myself, but I did manage to get a decent start from the tutorial at W3Schools. I leatned enough to replace some pretty nasty looping structures in some of my scripts with much more elegant (and faster) XSL transforms using XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT.

<xsl:rattus/>