Rating:  - Good geek book
Mastering Regular Expressions is for many people including among others casual users, system administrators, and programmers. Only programmers will understand (or need) the whole book, but people with only a tiny little Perl or Unix knowledge will gain much from the first few chapters. The RegEx book is useful as a primer to go a little beyond the usual wild card (i.e. '*') when searching text files for something, it's useful for systems administrators who need to write task automation scripts, and it offers Perl, Java, and .NET programmers a complete reference to the RegEx engines they need to understand to optimize their code.
And if they don't already have it, this will make a great present for your techno geek other half. They'll be impressed...
Rating: - 10 STARS
If I could give this book 10 stars I would.
This book opened my eyes to a lot of possibilities with regular expressions that I never knew existed. I had heard of regex programming for years, but had no idea they could be so powerful.
I don't know what else to say that hasn't already been said in other reviews. If you want or need to learn regular expressions, this is the *only* book you will need to buy.
Rating: - The Bible of RegEx
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.
Rating: - Get this book and get over your fear
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!
Rating: - Another excellent O'Reilly book
This is a great guide to regular expressions in Perl. It's so nice to see a 'proper' book once in a while, instead of superficial dumbed-down crap.
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