Rating: 
Summary: Great book !!
Review: This is a great book about regular expressions. Excellent for beginners, programmers and as a reference. The book contains lot of examples... and covers issues like searching in HTML documents, matching balanced set of parantheses, continuing with continuation lines, parsing csv files, doing search and replace, searching backwards, matching IP-addresses, file name checking, handling escape character etc. It covers regular expression API's in a many programming language API's. There are separate chapters on packages for regular expressions in Perl, Java and .NET framework. There are some useful comparisons among various packages available in each language, which might help getting started on right track.
The book is very well written and is easy to read. Probably it contains the most extensive documentation of regular expressions. It also describes some regex usage in applications like grep, emacs, awk, egrep, sed..
Rating: 
Summary: Masterfully written; bit of overkill for nonprogrammers
Review: Whether you are searching text documents with BBedit or flagging Usenet articles with Newswatcher, learning to use regular expressions can make your life a lot easier. Regular expressions ("regex") are text strings that allow you to search for complex variations of words and phrases. For instance, with the simple regex "gr[ea]y" you can flag any instances of the words "gray" or "grey". While a lot of applications support regex, finding out how to use this powerful function can be very difficult. There is suprisingly little online documentation of regex. Friedl's excellent book fills this void. In the introductory material, he covers what a regex is and how to use the regex language to do your own searches. The rest of the book, however, is aimed at programmers only, dealing with how various programming languages (such as Perl) implement regex. If all you want to do is use regex for searching text files or flagging Usenet articles, most of the book will not be useful to you. However, until someone comes out with a pocket manual of regex, Friedl's book is the only game in town.
Rating:
Summary: Another excellent O'Reilly book
Review: This is a great guide to regular expressions in Perl. It's so nice to see a 'proper' book once in a while, instead of superficial dumbed-down crap.
Rating:
Summary: Those wise birds!
Review: I got Mastering Regular Expressions in 1998 and I peek back regularly and it am proud to say is one of most used and useful books I own. Regular expressions are for everyone. They are simple to write and can be close to impossible to read and even unimaginably harder to understand. But reading comes after you can craft one. And this art of crafting RE is explained in astonishing detail and analysis in this book. Reader is carefully guided through basics, differences and common and uncommon pitfalls. Some of the parts are definitely not for the faint hearted! And this is especially true for parts that cover Perl RE. While main topic is Perl RE engine, a deep-enough travel through different RE dialects is made to help RE-crafting in almost any tool that supports REs. I've used the methods described in the book in tools as different as MS VC++, various editors, search engines and programming (Perl, PHP, C++, ...). The ability to use RE usually impressed people to the point they were sure I am using some incredible magic. But I must say that the most useful feature delivered in this book was ability to PARSE, UNDERSTAND and FIX a (slow, broken, strange acting) RE. This can be slowly absorbed by reader's (open) mind while carefully reading the book. The difference between meant/written can be as extreme as it can get in RE. I can (proudly) say I've been able to fix several complex REs, by simply (one could say blindly) following the rules laid in the book. My opinion is thath without this book real understanding of RE is almost impossible. I recommended it all of those who use programs that support (any form) of RE engine. It will help them solve some (hard) problems incredibly fast!
Rating:
Summary: Masterfully written; bit of overkill for nonprogrammers
Review: Whether you are searching text documents with BBedit or flagging Usenet articles with Newswatcher, learning to use regular expressions can make your life a lot easier. Regular expressions ("regex") are text strings that allow you to search for complex variations of words and phrases. For instance, with the simple regex "gr[ea]y" you can flag any instances of the words "gray" or "grey". While a lot of applications support regex, finding out how to use this powerful function can be very difficult. There is suprisingly little online documentation of regex. Friedl's excellent book fills this void. In the introductory material, he covers what a regex is and how to use the regex language to do your own searches. The rest of the book, however, is aimed at programmers only, dealing with how various programming languages (such as Perl) implement regex. If all you want to do is use regex for searching text files or flagging Usenet articles, most of the book will not be useful to you. However, until someone comes out with a pocket manual of regex, Friedl's book is the only game in town.
Rating:
Summary: The Bible of RegEx
Review: One of the hardest things, even for a seasoned programmer to grasp is regular expressions. They are powerful ways to search, manipulate and parse text fields and can often take several lines of code and shrink it down to a mystic, but powerful, expression. If you have ever had to parse a file for information, you know that one of the things that still haunts any programmer nowadays is how to match text. In this day and age of Object Oriented Programming, Web Services, etc. the power of Regex holds firm. Throughout this book the author takes great care not to overwhelm the reader with tons of code that has no meaning. The power of the book comes from the fact that if you read, and follow along, through the examples you will gain an understanding of how to do the techniques the author is referring to. At times it may seem like you have to read over a section twice, but you will realize that as you carry forth into the next section the material you read previously has turned into something you can now apply -- not just another example you can cut and paste and never really learn technique behind. This is a powerful book, covering many, many pages. Noone should expect to sit down and read it cover to cover and be done with it. The benefit comes from reading, applying, and referencing. I find myself using it several times a week to lookup information on Regular Expressions and to held solidify knowledge of techniques that I have used in the past. Whether you are a Windows, Unix, or even Macintosh person -- RegEx holds the key to text manipulation -- and this book holds the map you need to find that key.
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Summary: Get this book and get over your fear
Review: Regular expressions always terrified me. I really got tired of looking for related examples on the 'net and hacking sample code so I decided I had to take the plunge. I can say that the first chapter of this book is one of the most important chapters of any book I ever read. It leaves you breathless. Actually you'll probably want to read it again as the first time round you were so glued to the pages you didn't have time to try out the examples yourself. In a book such as this layout and typographical conventions are of utmost importance and this book gets this spot on. An author who can cover this subject without simply using masses of examples and dry outlines of selected syntax arrangements deserves an acolade. This book goes further. It stimulates the juices and is a struggle to put down (to the detriment of your hands-on practice as mentioned above). I was quite wary of exploring the territory of regular expressions and used to be very ambivalent towards Perl but this book helped to ease me in to a whole new world of script programming. This book is not just for Perl geeks. PCREs (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) are creeping into other programming and scripting languages now and this book will serve you no matter where you're coming from. Get this book and get over your fear!
Rating:
Summary: Amazing book
Review: I had just started learning perl and I knew I needed to learn how to use regular expressions. I breezed through learning perl and this book was next. I knew very little about regular expressions before reading this book and now I feel like I've mostly mastered them. I've read through it once and there is a lot of material that it covers so it was difficult to comprehend all of it the first time through but I feel I've understood the majority of regular expressions. I think the only part I would need to read through more is the optimization of regular expressions.
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Summary: Invaluable Regex Insights
Review: I used, but never truly understood, regular expressions until I read this book. If you use regular expressions in a production setting you need to understand them at a deep level to make sure you won't fall into performance traps. This book provides that deep perspective. The author really knows his stuff and is able to communicate it effectively. Another O'Reilly classic.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Learning Tool
Review: I have struggled with regular expressions for a couple of years now. Like most people, I knew 'something about them', and could cobble together a simple regex. But when it came to more demanding searches, I had to find the regex on the web, or I was out of luck. This book guided me to the next level (at least). It is one of the better computer tutorials I have read in the past couple of years. If you are looking for a resource to learn regular expressions, this is the one I'd recommend.
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