Comments about O'Reilly Media Regular Expressions Cookbook:

Well presented ideas. With clear information. Includes almost every flavor of regular expressions. The newbe or old timer can get good help from this book.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Regular Expressions Cookbook:

I don't think that regular expressions are especially difficult. But I feel that this book could be written in a more user-friendly manner. Although it contains a lot of good recipies and is pretty deep and exhaustive it completely fails to convey this knowledge. Examples are few and far between. Maybe next time these two geeks (I like the software they have developed much more that this book) should take a writer on board.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Regular Expressions Cookbook:

Throughout the book there are references to Recipes, However if think you are going to find a sensible referencing methodology you are mistaken. Instead we get things like
"See Also
Recipes 2.1, 2.2, and 2.7"

First I think these are line references that will be cross referenced throughout the book, NO!

Then I imagine there would be an appendix with these recipes listed at the end of the book, NO!!

Then I assume that these are actually pointing to the chapter + Section Numbers. NEGATIVE.

No there does not appear to be a salient discussion of how to use these recipes to refer to anything.

A far as I can see the Author had some cutesy idea of a COOKBOOK with Recipes, and the editorial staff left out the key ingredient.

I HATE THIS BOOK,
HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT!!!!

Comments about O'Reilly Media Regular Expressions Cookbook:

This book is directed at those who are already familiar enough with RegEx that they no longer need it = I suppose that make it a valuable reference book.

I could have benifited from the promised "examples and additional information." that is absent from the books website (Confimred via email by Oreilly Media book support.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Regular Expressions Cookbook:

This is a great book if you quickly need a particular regular expression. I also includes a chapter on regular expression basics.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Regular Expressions Cookbook:

This is the kind of book one doesn't actually read (unless you're a masochist ;-), but is essential to have around. Let's face it, very few of us are good with regular expressions. If you aren't using them every day (which most of us aren't) they are just some kind of black-magic stuff we need to do every now and then.

From what I've seen the examples and explanations are clearly written, and the fact that they show - and explain - solutions for Perl, .NET, Java, JavaScript, Python and Ruby makes this book too good to pass up.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Regular Expressions Cookbook:

If All You Have Is a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail. If All You Have Is a RegExp Cookbook, does Everything Looks Like a RegExp... well not really!

The book is well organized and easy to read. Examining the table of contents is a must in order to locate the gems you need to use and tweak. There are a few recipes that will get the work done (of course, these are all subjective and change based on your circumstances).

What's with all this hammer talk?

The authors are very clear that some of the RegExp solutions provided are there to illustrate usage but that there are a variety of other tools better suited to perform a certain task. For instance xmllint may be preferred over using "raw" RegExp to validate a file (IMHO)... so, before you run to use an example RegExp from the book, ask yourself is there a better tool for the task at hand?