What is XSLT like?

XSLT Tutorial (1) -- XSLT crash course
XSLT Tutorial (2) -- XSLT Engine
XSLT Tutorial (3) -- Optimization

See also our Paper:
Manaka, K., Sato, H.: Static Optimization of XSLT stylesheets: Template Instantiation Optimization and Lazy XML Parsing, Proc. ACM DocEng 2005, 55--57.