Regular Expressions Cookbook [Anglais] [Broché]

As much as I hate to admit it, regular expressions are hard for me. My need to use them is situation specific and I never really took the time to master them conceptually. So, when it comes time create one, I have to grope around to figure out how to meet the need at hand.

This book is really made for a person like me. The structure is problem-solution based. And, every problem is numbered in outline format. Thus, referencing back is an easy affair.

Want to know how to find bold text in an HTML file? This book will tell you how.

Want to learn how to split a sting using a regular expression? This book tells you how.

The book discusses solutions generally and in language specifics. It supports C#, Java, Javascript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, VB.NET.... the entire cast of the usual characters. (No pun intended.)

The writing is clear. You can take things in a bit at a time. And, that some of the problems use those 'hard to get concepts', the topical discussions actually teach you the difficult concepts in a manner that is pretty easy to understand. Sometimes you might have to go over a section of few times to get full understanding. But the review is not a chore.

This is a good, useful book. It's helping me to become a better engineer. And believe me, I need all the help that I can get! :)

This excellent book goes further and deeper than many tutorials on regular expressions. You might be surprised with some of the things you'll learn from reading it.

Unlike many cookbooks, this one doesn't dive into the recipes right away. I thought this was a good call because regular expressions are a specialized topic, and most developers don't work with regular expressions on a daily basis so they probably have to be reminded of the building block concepts and syntax, and get prepared for a discussion of more advanced features. Chapter One provides a list of recommended tools for working with regular expressions. Chapter 2 is a concise but very thorough discussion of building block and more advanced regular expression concepts (e.g., possessive quantifier or atomic grouping, named capturing groups, lookahead and lookbehind, etc.), including a discussion of differences in engine implementations and feature support. Chapter 3 is a hundred-plus page tutorial on how to work with regular expressions using different programming and scripting languages, including potential gotchas and workarounds. Chapters Four through Eight contain the recipes for solving real-world problems, with tips on how to improve an initial solution's readability (e.g., use named capturing groups when possible, etc.) and/or efficiency.

I was initially skeptical about the authors' ambitious goal of covering so many regular expression flavors, thinking the discussions of differences in engine supported features might prove distracting. The book is written and organized so well, however, my fear did not materialize. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that: of the covered flavors, Microsoft's DotNet regex engine supports some of the most advanced features.

There's not much to dislike about this book but if I were asked to suggest one or two things that might be of value-add to readers, I would suggest making available for download files containing appropriate subject strings for testing the book's various recipes as a convenience to readers who learn best by doing and want to follow along as they read the recipes, and for the book to include, for easy reference, a feature-support comparison matrix of the covered flavors, much like the comparison table available in the regular-expressions.info website.

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I was getting set to write a review of this book, when I happened to visit one of the blogs I regularly read -- Coding Horror. Jeff Atwood says it all for me so please take a look at what he has to say.

If you are a serious programmer or even if you are a Web GUI design person forced to do a bit of JavaScripting like me, you are going to run into situations where using a regex engine is the appropriate tool. Regular expressions are not easy to learn and are kind of boring. They are also very powerful.

Most of us learn faster by doing -- and that most often means working from code we or someone else has done before that does something a bit like what we want to do but needs some tweaking or extending or generalizing. If you are like me, you already have a collection of regular expressions to help in this process. This book does better than that by collecting hundreds of examples together in ways that build your understanding while never getting abstract or divorced from the real problems we face.

Your shelf has a place for this book. Recommended.
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