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Title: Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl ISBN: 0-596-00289-0 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 July, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.38 (80 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Comprehensive Guide to Regular Expressions
Comment: Most computer programmers have heard of regular expressions, discussed in hushed tones and conjuring images of Unix gurus and their incomprehensible commands and godlike mastery of their systems, yet few actually know enough about regular expressions or how they work to do more than a simple word match using one, if that.
This book covers regular expressions from top to bottom in great and exhaustive detail, including the hows and whys of performance and supported features between the different engines that process them. Though geared mainly toward Perl, the examples and text will apply to nearly any system that provides support, from PHP to ASP to Python.
The text is fairly dense and is not exactly geared toward the novice programmer, though. I've had classes in Finite State Machines and still had to really apply my grey matter in a few spots to understand everything being discussed. However, the understanding the reader gains upon completion of the text is invaluable and will expand one's programming potential exponentially.
The one real lack of the book is a good overview and quick-reference card, but on the whole, the book is a good selection from the O'Reilly library and well worth the read of any serious programmer.
Rating: 5
Summary: I need more stars... Bravo Jeffrey
Comment: Jeffrey Friedl's "Matering Regular Expressions" does a facinating job in taking you through the jungle (and I mean jungle) of RegExp.
I am a Perl/CGI programmer, and I had considered myself good at RegExp even before I read this book. Most of the things I knew were from Programming Perl, 3rd edition (chapter 5, Pattern Matching). But I still decided to give Jeffrey a chance since I was having some trouble with my Parse::Syntax module, which is designed to parsing *any* programming language and highlighting the syntax accordingly (provided it has a syntax/grammer file written for the specific language). The accuracy of the parser (and more importantly the speed) does depend on well crafted regular expressions.
As I started reading the book, I couldn't stop. I took it to my school's cafeteria with me and no one could make me leave untill I finished the whole book. I was excited. I was pleased! Here is the outline of tha chapters:
Chapter 1 and 2 introduce you to regular expressions and give some basic regex examples. Mail utility and date matching is two of them.
Chapter 3 mostly talks about conventions that all the regex tools follow and their differences.
Chapter 4 deals with Traditional NFA, POSIX NFA and DFA regex engines and their pros and cons. What you'll like the most is the details provided by the author on each and every single example. He also uses a lot of step-by-step illustrations to take you deeper into the regex engine itself and see/feel how it works. He shows the point of backtrackings and provides awesome benchmarks. He uses such examples of matching a quote, allowing escaped quotes inside the pattern, matching C-style comments, IP addresses and many more.
Chapter 5 deals with writing efficient regular expressions for NFA engines. It also re-vists some of the examples provided in the previous chapter and fine-tunes them.
Chapter 6 and 7 deals with Tool-Language specific features of Regex engines. Chapter 6 is dedicated to Awk, Tcl and GNU Emacs, whereas chapter 7 is entirely dedicated to Perl, good over 100 pages of Perlism.
It's true that there're features that Perl 5.6 offers when it comes to regex that didn't exist at the time this book went to press, (lookbehinds, for example). But this no way makes this book dated. Just take my word for it. Jeffrey put together a great masterpiece that will not die for many years, no matter how fast the technology tends to enhance
Haven't read anything more exciting than this for many years.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Bible of RegEx
Comment: 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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Title: Regular Expression Pocket Reference by Tony Stubblebine ISBN: 059600415X Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Programming Perl (3rd Edition) by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant ISBN: 0596000278 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 01 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: Perl Cookbook, Second Edition by Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington ISBN: 0596003137 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 21 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: sed & awk (2nd Edition) by Arnold Robbins, Dale Dougherty ISBN: 1565922255 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 02 March, 1997 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Learning Perl, Third Edition by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix ISBN: 0596001320 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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