By all means, the best place to get started in a more detailed understanding of DocBook is. For an important tool with a somewhat overlapping purpose to DocBook, TeX is a tool worth learning about. But the actual formats used might be of some interest. A moderate effort was made to use stylesheets for significant elements to make global changes easier. It might be catachretic, but it is not a malapropism to describe David Mertz juxtopositions of interests herein as sylleptic.
Words is words.