Comments about oreilly Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition:

As many folks in the computer field have done, I've collected quite a number of technical books over the years. On my desk (which is 'L shaped') to the right, is a 2 shelf bookcase which is fully stocked from the top, to the two inner shelves, with 70 books (I just counted them). Jeffrey Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions" holds a prominent position on the bottom shelf at "right arm's length" - I probably reach for it 40% of the time. I guess that sums up my opinion of this great resource!

Comments about oreilly Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition:

This is a GREAT book for Linux Admins, beginning programmers with no formal training...and people into managing and manipulating data. It is well written and if you've used unix from the command line in any capasity (sed, ed, vi, emacs, bsh, csh, ksh...) then you'll have no problem following this book.

Comments about oreilly Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition:

Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition

By Jeffrey E. F. Friedl

Third Edition August 2006

Pages: 542

Series: Adobe Developer Library

ISBN: 0-596-52812-4

Description

Written in the lucid, entertaining tone that makes a complex, dry topic become crystal-clear to programmers, and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition offers a wealth of information that you can put to immediate use.

The description above is quite an understatement. Even the full description does not do this book justice. Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition is almost a classic and should be on your bookshelf, chained down. If your programming friends, coworkers, or enemies try to borrow this book, beware. It takes quite a while to get it back, even bent, spindled and mutilated so you might not want it back [yeah that was actually tried]. You might try a rule about using it at your desk, but that did not work for me either.

My experience agreed with almost everything written, except that I do not have the in depth use of RegEx the author clearly has. I wish I was on the same page with him in experience with RegEx. I started with RegEx in college in the early 90s and remember six projects that I had to do that could have been much easier with this book. My programming experience used RegEx on occasion but not with the power explained in this book. I appreciate the detailed and thorough comparisons of the languages. The only word I really missed in the INDEX and Table of Contents was: SECURITY. Using RegEx to make sure security issues are properly handled would really help many programmers and developers.

The topics start with a Preface, then moves to Introduction to Regular Expressions, then Extended Introductory Example, then Overview of Regular Expression Features and Flavors, then The Mechanics of Expression Processing, then the Practical Regex Techniques, then Crafting an Efficient Expression, then Perl, Java, .NET, PHP, and finally the Index. Remember to read the Preface, it is very interesting. The author makes some points about how to read the book [the first six chapters] and how to THINK.

The 10 chapters are written very thoroughly. I like that about this book. Explanations of history and trivia are all over the place but are written like a story and easy to read. The figures are good and useful in the explanation of the concepts. The code is usually more than a few lines. This is a more complicated book and requires more expressive code examples.

The topics are useful and helpful in just about any language, including the more recent powerful languages like .NET and Java.

I thought the discriminations made about the different languages that use Regular Expressions went from general to specific in a hurry. Even so, the book is pretty long and needs to be digested in discrete chunks. No way to read this in one evening. There is no way to digest the concepts and comparisons very fast, at least for me. This is valuable knowledge worth your time to read and digest as thoroughly as possible.

The 540+ pages were easy to read and understand, partly told as a story. I read it in one week. There were a few typos and grammar errors, but not very many. The book is for someone who is a beginner or an expert and needs to know the specific times when one regular expression has even a slight benefit over another. More experienced people should look it over to make sure they are up to speed with this author.

I would give this book 5 out of 5 stars. Definitive!!!!!

Frederick J Eccher Jr

MBA

M.S. Management of Information Systems

A.B. Psychology

B.A. Biology

President, Board of Directors, Saint Louis Visual Basic Users Group

November 26, 2006

Comments about oreilly Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition:

Regular Expressions is basically the same across most languages (some variations as how you use it and terminology differences too), whether it may be C#, Javascript, PHP, Ruby, Python, TCL, Perl, or JAVA. This is amazing and should be used as an hand book for students and beginning to intermediate developers. As the book is in third edition some basics of the programming languages are expected to be know by its readers. Overall its a good book and worth a reading.

Comments about oreilly Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition:

As the author states, this is not a reference. It is everything you might ever want to know about regular expressions and then some. Well written, but a bit too epic for me, and if you aren't interested in perl - as I am not - there is a lot of information you just don't need (or want).

Comments about oreilly Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition:

"Mastering Regular Expressions" takes a great book and modernizes it to include the latest programming languages. The book starts out with assuming you know anything about Regular Expressions _ aside from the concept to be interested in picking up the book.

The author introduces regular expressions through examples and quickly introduces the constructs. The second third of the book goes into the details of how regular expressions are processed. This includes correctness and efficiency issues. The final third on the book goes over the syntax in Java, .NET, Perl and PHP. Tools like grep and awk are described in the text as well.

An alternate title for this book would have been "Thinking in Regular Expressions." Even if you think you know regular expressions, this book teaches you how much more there is to learn. It also teaches you some of the finer points of regular expressions in your favorite programming language along with cross references to the earlier part of the book.

The author uses good analogies to make the text understandable. After awhile, the concepts get so complicated that you have to read it many times to understand. A typically O'Reilly book. I've only had this book two weeks and I've already used it to make me a more effective developer!