XPath(1) Overview of XPath

XPath1.0 is the language to access node-set in XML Document. XPath2.0 is the language to access Sequence instead.

Every value in XPath 2.0 is a sequence of items. The items may be nodes or atomic values.

xPath = Path Expression + Condition

Everything is Sequence

There is only one data type in XPath2.0 - Sequence

Sequence could be items 

items could be node-set or atomic value or both

Items count from 1, actually Xpath count from 1

Operators

Xpath has its own set of operators:

Operators	Effect
+, -, *, div, mod, idiv	Arithmetic on numbers, dates, and durations
=, !=, <, >, <=, >=	General comparison: compare arbitrary sequences. The result is true if any pair of items, one from each sequence, satisfies the comparison
eq, ne, lt, gt, le, ge	Value comparison: compare single items
is	Compare node identity: true if both operands are the same node
<<, >>	Compare node position, based on document order
union, intersect, except	Compare sequences of nodes, treating them as sets, returning the set union, intersection, or difference
and, or	boolean conjunction and disjunction. Negation is achieved using the not() function.
to	defines an integer range, for example 1 to 10
instance of	determines whether a value is an instance of a given type
cast as	converts a value to a given type
castable as	tests whether a value is convertible to a given type

table from wiki

Path Expression

The path expression is the primary use of xpath. Path expression is usually in the format ofaxis::node-test[predicate]

Function library

XPath contains a large number of functions for working with different data types.

Purpose	Example Functions
General string handling	lower-case, upper-case, substring, substring-before, substring-after, translate, starts-with, ends-with, contains, string-length, concat, normalize-space, normalize-unicode
Regular expressions	matches, replace, tokenize
Arithmetic	count, sum, avg, min, max, round, floor, ceiling, abs
Dates and times	adjust-dateTime-to-timezone, current-dateTime, day-from-dateTime, month-from-dateTime, days-from-duration, months-from-duration, etc.
Properties of nodes	name, node-name, local-name, namespace-uri, base-uri, nilled
Document handling	doc, doc-available, document-uri, collection, id, idref
URIs	encode-for-uri, escape-html-uri, iri-to-uri, resolve-uri
QNames	QName, namespace-uri-from-QName, prefix-from-QName, resolve-QName
Sequences	insert-before, remove, subsequence, index-of, distinct-values, reverse, unordered, empty, exists
Type checking	one-or-more, exactly-one, zero-or-one

table from  wiki

This link gives SOME info of the useful XPath expressions 

http://saxon.sourceforge.net/saxon7.0/expressions.html