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Summary: Excellent book on for all programming language
Review: This book is useful for everybody who deals with string manipulation.Now even javaecript has the capability of doing so.Java has third party libraries for the same.Book incoporates examples form perl,shell,awk etc.
Must read for all developers.
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Summary: regex bible
Review: To my knowledge, this is THE authoritive book on regular expressions.I use the book mostly as a reference (usually when writing perl code), although it's history of different regex engines and their differences is quite interesting as well.
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Summary: Greatest computer book I've ever read
Review: This book is written in an easy-to-read conversational style, which makes it a joy to read through and easy to absorb all the wonderful content presented. I've read everything but the appendix and Chapter 7 (as I'm not a perl programmer, yet), and, if you start at chapter 1 and keep reading, it slowly explains regex's from start to finish. It begins with an introduction to regex's, and moves on from there, getting deep into how the regex engine parses your regular expression and how to take advantage of that knowledge to optimize your expression, and how the differences between programs' regex implementations affect your use of them. And all this is presented in a manner that is easy to absorb. Truly a gem in technical books!!!
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Summary: A necessary volume for any serious perl programmer
Review: There's not much to say about this book, really; like any O'Reilly book, it distills a lot of useful information into a compact, useful book. Any serious perl programmer needs a solid understanding of regular expressions, and this is volume to get it from. The best endorsement I can give this bok is this: Unlike a lot of perl books, we don't share this one in my office- we all have our own copy.
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Summary: can be much shorter
Review: This book can be much shorter. There are too many unrelated and meaningless things in this book. I can learn from this book, but not effective enough.
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Summary: verbose and over rated
Review: I got this book because it was highly recommended by two PERL experts, Tom Christiansen, and the author of EFFECTIVE PERL. But this 300 page book is written as if it were a novel and not a technical book. It could easily have been half the length, and I'm not exagerating. The long chapter on how NFAs & DFAs work will be of interest to few people. I expected to learn all sorts of cool tricks via regular exppressions and was dissapointed. Sure there are a few good examples, but at far too high a price in time involved and money. This book will only be of use to the very few people who are really into NFA theory. For most people, this is a wasteful book. Its possibly the worst, least useful technical book Ive read.
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Summary: Amazing!
Review: I have almost all of the O'Reilly Perl books, and they're all fairly complete -- but it would be impossible to be complete in one of those books when it comes to Regular Expressions. This text is a must-have for anyone using Perl or even object-oriented JavaScript, as it covers regular expressions in exhausting detail. If it isn't covered in this book it doesn't exist!
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Summary: PHP programmer says: EXCELLENT value! Everything's here.
Review: If you are an intermediate-or-better PHP programmer who wants to get a handle on regular expressions, you'll find this book so incredibly handy. I'm only a few chapters into the book and already I get the gist of regexs and how to use them with PHP... plus the Perl examples are very, very clear (the author stays focused on regex, Perl is just used to put it in a program's context, so he explains clearly what is going on with each line and you can see how it would translate easily to PHP)... the first chapter of this book did more to explain regexs than spending weeks searching the web for a *clear* tutorial. I suspect I'll skip most of the second half of the book-- after all, it's called "mastering regular expressions," and I don't really want to master them, I just want to be really good and then keep going with other stuff. (The author spends chapters looking at nearly EVERY regex tool out there, etc... which is not useful to me since I know I'm going to be using regexs 99% of the time in PHP.) If there is anything I could change about this book, it would be to put the first five-or-so chapters into a separate slim volume and *PLEASE* include a quick reference card for all the metachars! (that's my next purchase...) But listen, if you want to LEARN regexs, this book does the job, the writing is crystal-clear, the mini-quizzes every few pages are excellent, the typographic conventions (used to really make the expressions clear) are clever and smart, and this book has EVERYTHING you will EVER need on regular expressions, in your entire life. <g> Well worth the $; you won't ever need another regex book again.
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Summary: Excellent!
Review: I fought with Reg Expressions. Bash, Perl. I read this book. (Which still kicked my tail initially) By the time I actually 'understood' the last page, Everything else I was doing in Bash, and Perl just made sense. Suddenly stuff that took me weeks to do, I can do in a few minutes. Now I am working through 'Learning Perl' but understanding everything I read, because of the great foundation this book laid for me.
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Summary: Great book with problems
Review: I haven't read the book from cover to cover but have read parts of it. I don't deny that it is informative and occasionally helpful (especially if you come from a perl background). But the book as it stands is not appropriate for someone starting out in regular expressions. Instead it provides a lot of depth as far as how regular expressions are used in specific tools and all the different standards for regular expressions. But a lot of this information on regular expressions is not relevant or necessary for composing plain vanilla bash regular expressions. I suspect that the majority of readers will find a few chapters helpful, but will skip over at least a few chapters that have no bearing on their work. To spend so much time in a book talking about the different implementations of regular expressions is to beg the question about whether you should read a general book or instead read a book about the implementation of r.e. specific to your computer language. I have two complaints. First, the book does not try to teach you the art of writing regular expressions (it assumes a certain level of familiarity already). As a learning book, it may not be satisfy your needs. The second complaint is that the book doesn't include an adequate reference section or at least a section you can refer to when trying to write your own regular expressions. I found myself flipping back and forth from pages to try to find the aspect of regular expressions I need. A more methodical reference chapter or appendix is sorely needed. Don't get the impression I am not recommending this book. It is a fine book; only be sure that you thumb through it at a bookstore to make sure that the kind of material it presents is what you are looking for. For me it was not. The best teaching book I've found to explain regular expressions is Practical Guide to Linux by Mark Sobell. It's old, but it explains regular expressions, sed, awk and grep better than any book, including this one. This book presented the clearest examples of any computer book I have encountered.
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