Mastering Regular Expressions: Powerful Techniques for Perl and Other Tools: Amazon.ca: Jeffrey E.F. Friedl: Books

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Regular expressions are a central element of UNIX utilities like egrep and programming languages such as Perl. But whether you're a UNIX user or not, you can benefit from a better understanding of regular expressions since they work with applications ranging from validating data-entry fields to manipulating information in multimegabyte text files. Mastering Regular Expressions quickly covers the basics of regular-expression syntax, then delves into the mechanics of expression-processing, common pitfalls, performance issues, and implementation-specific differences. Written in an engaging style and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions offers a wealth information that you can put to immediate use.

Review

As the only reference to the art, it should be on the bookshelf of every programmer and anyone who works with large text files. -- Major Keary, Book News, 2002 No 5

If you have ever used a regular expression or ever wanted to use one, this is the book for you! -- James Lance, Provo Linux User Group, May 2002

This book contains everything
you need to know bout the mysterious regex -- David Wller, Java Developers Journal Jan 2002

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83 Reviews

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4.4 out of 5 stars (83 customer reviews)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bible of RegEx, April 29 2004

By

Robert L. Stinnett (Boonville, MO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Mastering Regular Expressions (Paperback)

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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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Get this book and get over your fear, April 14 2004

By

Jon Wright (Vietnam) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mastering Regular Expressions (Paperback)

Regular expressions always terrified me. I really got tired of looking for related examples on the 'net and hacking sample code so I decided I had to take the plunge.

I can say that the first chapter of this book is one of the most important chapters of any book I ever read. It leaves you breathless. Actually you'll probably want to read it again as the first time round you were so glued to the pages you didn't have time to try out the examples yourself.

In a book such as this layout and typographical conventions are of utmost importance and this book gets this spot on. An author who can cover this subject without simply using masses of examples and dry outlines of selected syntax arrangements deserves an acolade. This book goes further. It stimulates the juices and is a struggle to put down (to the detriment of your hands-on practice as mentioned above).

I was quite wary of exploring the territory of regular expressions and used to be very ambivalent towards Perl but this book helped to ease me in to a whole new world of script programming.

This book is not just for Perl geeks. PCREs (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) are creeping into other programming and scripting languages now and this book will serve you no matter where you're coming from.

Get this book and get over your fear!

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Never has so much been made of so little, Mar 23 2000

By

J. Stapleton (Virginia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Mastering Regular Expressions: Powerful Techniques for Perl and Other Tools (Paperback)

If you're looking for a handy desktop reference this book is NOT it. When faced with a short-fused development schedule and needing to get up to speed with regexps rather quickly I found the book to be difficult to navigate, inconcise, and the overuse of bold, italics, and foreign (Japanese?) characters and other oddities very annoying. I thought the book went way beyond regular expressions and therefore found it of little use as a reference guide. It is better suited as a tutorial for someone that has a lot of time on his/her hands. A much better reference, also from O'Reilly, can be found in "JavaScript - The Definitive Reference", by Danny Goodman.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars It's "The Book"
I'll keep the review short, if your looking to learn regular expressions in any form, this is the book you want to pick-up. Read more

Published on Mar 11 2010 by Brianne Salmon

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential for the reference library!
This book is a must have for your programming library! It has helped when I needed a regex solution for a complicated query!

Published on Oct 1 2008 by Joel Andrews