Comments about oreilly Regular Expression Pocket Reference, Second Edition:

Contrary to what is implied in a previous review, this does actually include information about a C library: PCRE.

It's terse but concise. You do need to be familiar with the language or tool for each section that is being referred to, since the examples and notes assume a reasonable degree of familiarity with the concepts.

Excellent summary of the language specific libraries of you're already familiar with RE, but a terrible learning tool if you're not. Don't expect it to be that.

Comments about oreilly Regular Expression Pocket Reference, Second Edition:

Its a great book, well written and very useful. But I don't know if is an errata, in the front cover you can read: Regular expressios for Perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, C... and here is the problem, in the index there ins't nothing about C.

Comments about oreilly Regular Expression Pocket Reference, Second Edition:

From the back cover of the Regular Expression Pocket Reference: "Ideal as a quick reference," and ", makes an ideal on-the-job companion." All this is true if you are well-versed in regular expressions and use multiple programming languages (and confuse the syntax).

I like the use of the same examples across programming languages (where applicable).

The recipes in the cookbook section are great, although I would have liked to see additional recipes (like stripping HTML tags, matching credit card numbers etc,). Of course the examples are endless and over time one builds his/her own recipe collection. At least this is a good place to start.

Comments about oreilly Regular Expression Pocket Reference, Second Edition:

This book is the best regex ref I've seen.

The Introduction to Regular Expressions and Pattern Matching does an excellent job of covering the features common to most regex engines, plus the POSIX character classes and the Unicode properties, which I use infrequently enough that I can never remember. The recipes section will be extremely useful to those with limited experience.

The only regex engines not covered, that I know of, are the variants in the Windows findstr utility (a subset of stuff in the intro) and the bizarre dialect used by the VisualStudio editor.

The latter would be the most welcome addition, since I can never remember the syntax. I suspect it is completely different from any other regex syntax to facilitate searching and replacing text in .NET regular expressions, as well as code, though I'd much rather add the extra backslashes than try and get used to the idea of : as an escape character and { } for grouping.

This ref is otherwise definitive, in my experience. It even documents the upcoming changes in Perl 5.10 (separately from 5.8, which I am thankful for), such as named submatches.

Another critical piece of info included for each language is the raw string syntax (none for Java, alas, meaning a Java regex to match a Windows path has more backslashes than askaninja.com) -- essential for readable, maintainable regular expressions.

A book everyone should own.

Comments about oreilly Regular Expression Pocket Reference, Second Edition:

This book is the best reference for regular expressions. The second edition came out in July 2007 and has several updates over the previous version. The reason for the books ease-of-use lies in the organization. The chapters represent one language each. For each language, listings of the meta-characters and examples are shown. Depending on the language being displayed, there are other subjects covered such as unicode support, object orientation, and different topics unique to the language. The primary parsing engine is listed at the beggining of the chapters with the examples arranged at the ends of the chapters. I generally need to look up expression for JavaScript and .NET. Both of these are covered plus perl, java, php, python, ruby, pcre, apache, vi and shells. I just bookmark the 2 areas I need and I can lookup the expression listing in a few seconds.