Learn basic concepts, key features, and capabilities of YAML.

In this course, you will run through a comprehensive overview of the YAML data serialization language and its syntax. You will also cover the basic concepts behind this language, understand its main features, and the capabilities of YAML. 

You will kick things off by understanding what exactly YAML is. You will then move on to more concrete topics like syntax, data types, and more complex data types such as sequences, mappings, and pairs.

By the end of this course, you will have a great new skill that is transferable and highly applicable.

Tarun Telang

Tarun Telang is a passionate software engineer, blogger, author and active contributor in online technical forums like DZone and SAP Developer Community Network.

DevOps Expert

Introduction to YAML

In this chapter, I am presenting you with a simple document with the structure below. It contains employee data and its corresponding representation using all the popular data formats like XML and JSON. 

The following is a graphical representation of the data:

This will help you further strengthen your understanding based on your previous experience. You will also be able to better understand the key differences in these data representation specifications. 



# Overview of XML

XML stands for *Extensible Markup Language*. It is designed to store and transport data across many different IT systems. It is heavily used for communication across multiple distributed systems over the internet. 

**Example**

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Organization>
    <Department name="HR" head="Director">
      <Employees>
        <Employee>
            <id>12</id>
            <name>John</name>
            <manager>123</manager>
            <joining>2002-01-09</joining>
        </Employee>
      </Employees>
</Organization>

XML is not easily readable by humans. XML has to be parsed with an **XML parser** for consuming it programmatically.

However, XML uses a self-describing syntax.

Line 1 contains a prolog that defines the XML version and the character encoding as below:

```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
```
Line 2 is the root element of the document:

```
<Organization>
```
Line 3 starts a `<Department>` element with properties `name` and `head`:

```
<Department name="HR" head="Director">
```


The `<Employee>` elements have 4 child elements: `<id>`, `<name>`, `<manager>`, and `<joining>`.

```
<id>12</id>
<name>John</name>
<manager>123</manager>
<joining>2002-01-09</joining>
```
The last line ends the element:

```
</Department>
```

Learn about XML and JSON data formats and see how YAML represents data in a more readable and cleaner format. 
 

YAML overview

Syntax of YAML

Applications of YAML

Course assessment

Comparison of various data formats

Overview of XML