sed & awk (2nd Edition)

Perl Cookbook, Second Edition

Learning the vi Editor (6th Edition)

Classic Shell Scripting

Programming

Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition

Format: Paperback
Author: Jeffrey E F Friedl
ReleaseDate: 15 July, 2002
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

Deep study of a deep subject


If you are verifying input from a form or analyzing an HTML page or engaged in any other sort of pattern matching, Regular Expressions are something you should master. Regular Expressions are a powerful pattern matching process built into many programming languages (but often hidden and not fully exploited).

The problems addressed by this book are (a) regex is poorly documented in general and (b) it has grown up ad hoc: every language's implementation is different from every other, sometimes very different.

The book does a good job of documentation and explanation in the early chapters. But in the later chapters it falls prey to the problem it is trying to solve. If you use Perl or Java or VB. NET, then this book gives a lot of very important information not easily found elsewhere.

On the other hand, if you use PHP, MySQL or JavaScript (as I do) you have to look elsewhere for the advanced topics.

No summary or synopsis, only good for thorough detail.
I admit it covers the subject very well, but if you don't know Regular Expressions thoroughly, you have to read every word of the book or look forever to find what you want. Get the small pocket reference guide instead of this book! It is difficult to find what you want if you don't know exactly what you are looking for. Just buy the pocket reference guide and go to the library once a year when you need this thing.

The regex bible


A "must have". The only book to explain regular expression in a clear and exhaustive manner, covering differences between the most important programming language in which regex are used.