The title of this talk is actually an allusion to Mike Smith's article Don't learn XML , where he suggests using the DocBook DTD and stylesheets to get started using XML for documentation rather than starting from scratch, writing your own DTD, stylesheets, and so on. My title is more than a little misleading. I'll explain how to get started with DocBook without learning much XML, but I also hope to show you how to get started learning the technologies that make a DocBook-based system tick.