With the addition of update capabilities to SPARQL 1.1, SPARQL has become a more interesting language for managing semantic web data (i.e., RDF Triples, etc.).

This introductory book on SPARQL will get you started with learning the language right away. It doesn't go over a lot of theoretical stuff about the semantic web, but it does devote one chapter out of seven to it, covering just enough concepts and background material to get you grounded quickly.

The book begins with basic tutorials on how to write simple queries, before moving on to more complex queries, such as those involving the use of filters and data grouping, and the integration of results from querying more than one local and/or remote data sources.

The tutorials on data querying are then followed by tutorials on how to use SPARQL for inserting, deleting, and changing semantic web data. The last chapter discusses how SPARQL result sets can be returned in various formats (e.g., XML, JSON) and mentions a number of libraries available to web developers that can help in the integration of such data into web applications.

After reading this book, you would have learned many useful and practical techniques, such as: how to initially vet an unfamiliar dataset for, say, potential violations of important business rules, before incorporating parts or all of it to your database; how to identify and isolate problematic data; how to perform previews before you delete or insert data, etc.

You can download the data and code files used in this book from the website mentioned in the book. To follow along with the hands-on tutorials, you only need two pieces of easy to install and configure open source Java-language based software from the Open Jena Project: ARQ and Fuseki (links to the download areas for these software are given in the book, but the Fuseki download area might have been altered because I found it in a slightly different address). You won't be writing Java code because all the code samples can be run using command scripts (where you only need to provide the command with names of your data and query files) or interacting with a web form. I went through many of the exercises using ARQ 2.8.8 and Fuseki 0.2, and did not encounter problems with the downloaded files, except for a minor one involving a data file that ARQ flagged as having an illegal RDF token (the file had an XML style comment line <!-- ... --> that upon removal made ARQ happy again).

Although the book does contain the occasional comments on whether a technique might be more performant than another one, I did not really expect a first generation book on SPARQL to devote much space to performance this early in the evolution of products that support SPARQL.

I thought that, overall, the book is well written and easy to follow. For subsequent editions of this book, I hope the author will have an opportunity to expand on the last chapter, Building Applications With SPARQL: A Brief Tour, to include even more practical information, and perhaps, even lessons learned.