Rating:  - Great Book!
This is a great book for learning about regular expressions. It goes into much detail, yet still remains an easy read for a novice who has not had much experience to RegEx. Recommended.
Rating: - Excellent Resource
Regular Expressions need to be fully mastered in order to truly gain access to the power of many languages and programs. Whether you are working with Perl, PHP, Java, .NET, Ruby, C, Python or any of a variety of other languages the use of regular expressions allows you to work with your data in powerful ways. As a general rule most books that even mention regular expressions just mention a very few of the common ways to build an expression. This book takes the reader well beyond that level and explores the many more unusual ways regular expressions can be used. If you don't know what a regular expression is then you have no need for this book, but if you have ever worked with regular expressions then you are in for a treat with this book. I have used them for years and built a whole spam filter system around regular expressions but there is so much more they can do and this book can make you an expert.
After a basic introduction covering the most common tasks regular expressions are used for (substitution, selection, wild cards, etc.) the author delves into examples of regular expressions in Perl, and follows that with a section discussing some of the variations in regular expressions as implemented in different languages and common programs. One of the most important features of the book is the plethora of real world programming examples. Mastering Regular Expressions is highly recommended to anyone who wants to completely master the full art of regular expressions.
Rating: - A gem - technical presentation as it should be
Regular expressions are not really for the person playing at would-be programmer. It is to the text processing person what a top-of-the-line drill is to a carpenter. It requires a dedication to detail, an ability to write out exactly what needs to be done and why it works. Regexs are used in a context. Perl for example, helps the process along by supplying a well-packaged and documented environment for regex. But this means you have to learn Perl, or Java, or PHP, Python, Ruby, whatever. This book is for the kind of person that fits somewhere in the above described mix. It is however, THE book to have when you do care enough. It is not an easy book for a beginner or those in a hurry. Whatever it is that is covered here is done well and authoritatively (spelling ?). The author knows his stuff and the pains-taking effort he talks about in his Preface is obvious to the student of the book.
I believe this topic lends itself to being best taught by looking hard at a big bunch of non-trivial examples, with a lot of surrounding comments. They are in the book, I wish there were more. Perhaps the buyers of this book, along with the regex gurus out there could start posting well-crafted regexs to some well-known spot. I believe that O'Reiily, the publisher of this boo already might have such a posting site.
Kudos to O'Reilly and to the author for a wonderful contribution to the computer programmer/science community
Rating:  - Great reference to Regular Expressions
Regular Expressions can be confusing unless you use them everyday. This book is a great quick reference and will provide the deeper level information you need for those harder solution.
Rating: - Mastering Regular Expressions - A must-read for any savvy power-user
For many savvy computer users, regular expressions embody the perfect utility: a well defined, documented, and designed tool that makes complicated and arduous jobs short and easy. That being said, the craft of regular expressions (hereafter, `regex') makes about as much sense as a foreign language to the uninitiated or novice. Regex have no immediately apparent meaning to those unfamiliar with them, and are so enigmatic in appearance that many users do not even attempt to understand them - writing them off as a tool only for experts. "Mastering Regular Expressions" sets out to not only make regex understandable, but easy to apply to a wide range of situations.
Stylistically and structurally, this is one of the most unique O'Reilly publications I have read. The author even says in the early chapters to think of the book as a novel, and not as a reference (the book's structure doesn't really lend itself to being a reference book anyways). The mindset that the author applies to his writing makes a discernable difference in how the book reads, and it feels more like a chronological story and less like a textbook as a result. Even the quizzes that the author scatters throughout the book are treated as part of the "story", and the solutions are on the very next page rather than in the back of the book or at the end of the chapter. As a result, the book is very easy to read, and flows extremely well. It feels much less like a textbook and more like a narrated lesson from an enjoyable professor.
With a topic as muddy and potentially confusing as regex, I was worried that the text would be just as confusing to follow. However, I was pleasantly surprised. The text itself is very well written, and very clear. There was never an instance in which I had trouble comprehending what the author was trying to communicate, and I almost never had to go back and re-read something multiple times to grasp the concept.
Furthermore, the text is full of excellent examples with accompanying explanations. The author almost exclusively teaches through example, and as a result, most of the lessons are extremely practical and great real-world applications. All of the code examples (of which there are many page-long instances of) are very well documented, and easy to understand.
Regex really is one of the most portable utilities that exists in the UNIX world. It can be applied to an enormous number of situations, and is interoperable with a laundry list of other tools and languages. As such, regex is not only a tool, but a general concept that must be grasped prior to proper usage - and this is what the first several chapters focus on. Thinking about problems in terms of regex is something that takes practice, and does not come easily to most people. This book tends to teach through example, and jumps right into matching simple regex to text lines to demonstrate how regex works. This brings me to my next point.
This book is not for beginners. I cannot stress this enough. The chapters not specifically aimed at a language require solid knowledge of a structured language like C++ or Java. Granted, the book really won't appeal to anyone that doesn't use computers on an advanced level on a regular basis; however, what I want to stress is that regardless of the reader's level of computer experience, if the reader does not have advanced knowledge of text handling in serious computer languages, most of the book's content will be too complex.
On the same note, and this is not a bad thing, about half the book is language-specific. There is a chapter for Perl, PHP, and Java. Obviously, if you don't know these languages, then most of the content of these chapters will be useless. This is not to say that the book will be useless to you if you don't know these languages - the non-language specific chapters occupy a large portion of the book, and contain more than enough material to master regex - however, the reader should be aware that just under half the book is aimed at specific languages.
Overall, this book is nothing short of fantastic. The audience for it is very limited - however, the author manages to make a concept difficult to understand, and even harder to master, easy to read about and learn. Clearly, a lot of thought went into the craft and design of this book, and it shows. I would highly recommend this book to any programmer, system administrator, or computer power user.
|
