This page tells you how to get started with the DocBook authoring system by starting form a very simple template.
Getting the template
Create a new directory, change into this directory, copy and unpack the template file:
$ mkdir MyDoc $ cd MyDoc/ $ cp ~ziegler/Documents/DocBookProjectTemplate.tgz . $ tar xzf DocBookProjectTemplate.tgz $ rm -f DocBookProjectTemplate.tgz
At this point, the directory contains 3 files:
$ ls Book.xml Makefile schemas.xml
The file schemas.xml tells Emacs where it can find the DocBook schema definition. If you are nort using Emacs, you can safely ignore or delete it.
Editing the document
For editing DocBook documents, you should always use a validating editor.
Validating editors (sometimes also called schema-aware, DTD-aware, or context sensitive editors) are applications that interactively validate documents against a certain schema or DTD as you edit them. Because they understand the schema or DTD rules, they can make editing documents much easier. For example, if you want to insert a new element at a certain point in a DocBook document, a validating editor shows you a list of only those elements that the DocBook schema says are valid at that point in the document (instead of showing you a list of all 375+ elements in DocBook).
You can find a list of validating editors [http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookAuthoringTools here].
Open the file Book.xml in the editor of your choice and study it. It is quite self-explanatory (which is the sense of having verbose markup).
If you want to know at which point you can insert which element, look at the DocBook Element Reference section in the [http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/docbook.html DocBook Definite Guide]. The "TDG" (The Definite Guide) is the most important documentation on DocBook.