essential reading

[jacques couzteau]

hello,

with respect to the wealth of documentaion material i am seeking some advice on what books or online articles/docs/HowTo are essential to read in order to implement something like an online-mag that reads from a posgreSQL-db and static text and runs in tomcat.

My goal is to get a quickstart at developing my own wepapps using XSLT and a posgreSQL and get the important stuff right from the beginning.

I like hands-on-examples and working apps that i can derive my own apps from and i want solutions quickly. I'm a programmer with scientific background and i know Perl, C/C++, Java. I'm quite fond of the Perl Cookbook. Is the XSLT-Cookbook good for me?

So far i had a glance of the online cocoon-documentation, the the oreilly-XML-Bookshelf, some articles at XML.com and the apache definitive guide. I'm willing to buy a book, but from a book that i buy i expect to use it a lot.

What about the following books:
+XSLT Cookbook by Sal Mangano
+Cocoon 2 Programming (Bill Brogden, Conrad D'Cruz, Mark Gaither)
+Cocoon Developer's Hanbook (by Lajos Moczar (Author), Jeremy Aston)
+Cocoon: Building XML Applications by Carsten Ziegeler (Author), Matthew Langham (Author)
+Cocoon 2 Programming: Web Publishing with XML and Java

The wealth of material is killing. I don't know where to start?

Thank you for suggestions.

jacques