Introducing Regular Expressions: Unraveling Regular Expressions, Step-by-Step

The back cover squib declares the book is for "a programmer new to regular expressions". In fact, this slim volume would be valuable to a great many people who need to be efficient searchers. As the opening line of Chapter 2 states, "[r]egular expressions are all about matching and finding patterns in text from simple patterns to the very complex". Lots of people need this kind of search capability, but eyes quickly become quizzical when you mention regular expressions and grow cloudy when you try to describe them. The reality is that regular expressions are not intuitive. There is a learning curve to be surmounted. And author Michael Fitzgerald attempts to make learning how to understand and use regular expressions as painless as possible. For the most part, he is successful. The cover tagline claims "Unraveingregular Expressions, Step-by-Step". And that's what he does. If you are already familiar with regular expressions, you don't need this book. But the beginner will find the step-by-step instructions fairly easy to comprehend. Fitzgerald covers all the basics in the first eight chapters. In the ninth chapter, he focuses on the needs of a programmer or web developer - and this may lose some readers. There's a regular expression reference and glossary as well. I do wish the author had stuck to one tool for his explanations instead of hopping between several, but that is really a minor issue. Overall, programmers will find this a valuable book if they know little or nothing about regular expressions. For non-programmers who can be convinced they need to know regular expressions, the going will be somewhat more difficult, but the payoff for them is hughely increased search efficiency.Jerry

Good book - well thought out and very in depth. RegEx's aren't for the faint of heart, and it takes serious work to figure them out. The book helped quite a bit.

This book is a good, succinct introduction and a great reference!I find Fitzgerald's style and approach to be extremely helpful to accomplish the goal of introducing (the frustratingly non-intuitive concept of) Regular Expressions.This book's approach affords readers the ability to pick up whatever flavor of regex they desire quickly and painlessly. And it gives plenty of references of where to find more.Notwithstanding, I could see how this approach could overwhelm novices (who'd get caught up with the syntactic peculiarities between the many varieties of Regular Expressions and the frameworks used).I also have O'Reilly's "Regular Expression Cookbook" (Goyvaerts & Levithan), but I find myself using the reference section of this book significantly more than the cookbook (approximately 100 to 1).I hope this review either encourages you to buy and read this book or that it helps you decide that O'Reilly's "Regular Expressions Cookbook" or "Mastering Regular Expressions" (Friedl) is more of your cup of tea.

Excellent introduction to regex writing. I have years of experience with regex and own several books, including O'Reilly's Mastering regex and Regex cookbook. both very good books, but way above what a beginner would comprehend without tremendous effort. I've been looking for a clear, succinct book for people with little to no experience with regular expressions. And have a few beginner books.This is by far the most clearly written introduction. It's a small book, but takes the beginner through all the basic parts of a regex, up through lookaheads and lookbehinds.The final examples using Perl were good useful examples, but could have used a little more expansion on how to read the syntax (very similar to SED). I typical programmer will go through this book fairly quickly, but with a solid foundation for comprehending more advanced books and resources.

I think every Python program should have this book sitting around.

Llego rapido pero con la portada y contraportada muy sucia, el interior esta bien 👍

I found this book had what I needed to get started, but it quickly got into topics and examples which were not interesting. I still like to have hardcopy sitting next to my keyboard so I'm not flipping through different windows or working in smaller windows. However, for this book, I think a different format would have likely been better. The book references different highlights or colors, which are apparently only available in the electronic formats (there's a note about it on page 3). A couple of the online tools referenced have been updated, so I had to work around the instructions a little to try things for myself and do some of the exercises. So, I think it'll be good for a reference, but it's not great in the print edition.

I don’t mind to pay a little extra for a full page in color version

East to forget, this book does a great job of explaining from the 'ground up'.

the book you need to read before "Regular Expressions Cookbook ..."

This is easily one of the worst books I've ever purchased or read.There's so little to be learned about regexs in this slim, confusing, misguided book. "Unraveling Regular Expressions, step-by-step" is *such* a misleading subtitle - this book does nothing of the sort - it doesn't even make an attempt.Such a terrible approach to conveying this topic. Ugh. One test of the quality of any technical book is its use as the basis of a taught course. This book would provide no more than 1-2 hours of perplexing course material, and would result in the unfortunate students rioting in frustration.I will never again purchase a book from O'Reilly.

When I first received this book through the post - what initially struck me was just how small and thin from a purely physical perspective it was. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, but everything about this product seemed to follow this initial first impression of being deeply underwhelming.Although officially around the 150 odd pages mark, it's probably a lot closer to 100 once you've taken out the large diagrams (which in my opinion are not needed) and the other normal format related and organisational fluff. Again underwhelming. The author's writing style is informal which is ok, but he never drops down deep enough into the details of the subject either - which makes for a read that I imagine would be not to disimilar from talking about Regular Expressions with some bloke in the pub.That's probably the biggest flaw, just not enough detail. Not enough information for which you can sink your teeth into. Maybe I've just been spoilt by the likes of David Flanagan amongst other O'Reilly writers who write about their subjects in such all-encompassing specifics that's it's almost borderline excessive (in a good way). Flanagan's previous work for example include JavaScript: The Definitive Guide - a book that exceeds a thousand pages, provides an API reference and describes how the very underlying mechanisms of the language work - all without the need for overly large pretty pictures. And hey, maybe the author himself recognised this short coming because he frequently (and some what patronisingly) tells us to 'smell the syntax' or something along those lines which is basically to fiddle around and run code repeatedly till we just magically 'get it'. Excuse my indignation, but if I wanted to employ that sort of moronic, brute force type of strategy I wouldn't have bothered to pick up a book in the first place. How about treating us like adults and telling us how a regular expression actually groups together ?After reading this book, I still don't know how regular expressions work in any reasonable depth - I imagine therefore that myself and anyone else would struggle to write any form of customised code. There are some nice examples in here though that do some fancy stuff but I doubt I would be limited to just those problem areas in any real situation.I therefore find it hard to recommend this book, even for complete beginners. You can find better more concise information freely available on the internet than what's available in this. I also feel mildly ripped off thanks to it being a short book with plenty of padding. This should have been a pocket reference type book, a miniature/compact series that O'Reilly does on occasion - what would have been an average pocket reference thus makes for a shoddy full blown book.