Customer Reviews

Beginning Regular Expressions (Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Great breadth of languages, tools, and examples

This is the most comprehensive regular expressions book I have seen. After steering you through some regular expressions essentials (about 250 pages or the first 1/3 of the book) it then gets into specifics and examples for all of the following languages and applications:

StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Writer

Microsoft Word and VBA for Microsoft Word

Findstr

PowerGrep

Excel

SQL Server 2000

MySQL

Microsoft Access

JavaScript and JScript

VBScript

VB.NET

C#

PHP

XML Schema

Java

Perl

Most other books I've seen concentrate just on Perl. For anyone who uses 2, 3 or more of these languages or applications (and who doesn't use at least that many) this is much more useful than a Perl reg ex book.

Beyond the list of languages and applications covered, there are numerous examples in every chapter that can easily be used as is, or modified to fit your needs. A few of the examples are:

Converting dates to international format

Finding words in close proximity (in the same sentence)

Cleaning up an online chat transcript

Validating a social security number

Ignoring whitespace

Separating a delimited string into parts

Finding repeated words or characters

Adding links to URLs

Matching Canadian Postal codes

Verifying IP address format

Finding HTML/XHTML header elements

Matching telephone numbers

For years I have wanted to learn how to use Regular Expressions. But the short tutorials that I came across left me double cross eyed perplexed! I finally came across Beginning Regular Expressions. Now the whole process is a piece of cake. The author takes a very cryptic subject and makes it totally clear. Within two hours of reading this book while laying on the couch, I was able to hop up and write cryptic looking formulas as if it was my second nature. Regular expressions are so powerful and so helpful. I'm so glad I finally came across this book. Thanks to the author who painstakingly broke it down to the most basic levels and made everything crystal clear! If you have an interest in POWERFUL search and replace across a lot of files, this book is your ticket to search and replace paradise!

As an introduction to regular expressions, this book does an excellent job of covering the many different ways in which regular expressions are used. Included are explanations of how to put regular expressions to use in client-side Javascript, Microsoft Word, Open Office, C#, PHP, Perl, ASP, etc (Just a few that I could think of off the top of my head). I especially like that the author didn't focus on only Microsoft products, or only on open source products. He gives an excellent introduction to how regular expressions fit in in both the world of programming, and simply using your computer from day to day. This is a huge book, and Mr. Watt does a fantastic job of covering both syntax (nuts and bolts) and real-world application. This is an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to more about Regular Expressions.

^I really [enjoyed|liked] this book. Regular expressions like [any|every]thing takes practice to learn. The book provided real-world examples such as validating e-mail addresses. It is easy to get a regular expression wrong which could cost you $

I already know regex fairly well and thought I could learn a few more things by reading this book. Turns out, there are way more things to learn about regex than I really wanted to. I started learning new things right away with this book, but soon realized that mastering this topic would mean giving up mastery on another.

A great book if you really need to get into complex regex.

Regular expressions are one of those useful concepts that programmers have reimplemented in each new, aspiring language or software package. There has always been an abiding need for a compact notation that lets skilled users (and programmers) denote what they are looking for, in a set of textual data.

Watt brings a lot of this work together, so that you can concisely find what you might need. Also, the book shows that much of the notation is common across the many implementations. Plus, once you've mastered a few of these, learning another is easy. Your experience transfers well.

Chapter 2 has a good summary of the rest of the book. It points to a comprehensive list of packages and languages that have regexp, and which are covered later in the book. The packages include the open source StarOffice, and Microsoft Word and Excel. While the languages include JavaScript, JScript, VBScript, VB.NET, C#, Java, PHP and Perl.

The heft of the book lies in supporting these examples. But the basic ideas are very simple.

I picked this book up because I had no idea just what a Regular Expression was. Turns out that regular expressions are nothing more than the "wildcards" from a lot of applications like Microsoft Word that have been generalized to fit a lot of applications in text processing.

For instance you may want to examine an incoming field from an internet form. If the data is going to a social security column in a database, you want to be sure that the data doesn't say something like Fred-34-1234. It's the right format, but alpha isn't a good thing to have there. If this isn't checked form, it may wait until the SQL Insert statement blows up.

The generalized form of expressions like this can be used to check things like SSN formats, the proper formation of an e-mail address and a lot of other things commonly needed in text processing.

Many languages both programming and scripting have provisions built into them to handle this kind of text processing. This book provides the generalized background to use regular expressions in ways that that you haven't considered but which you'll find very useful.

A good introduction, but I was disappointed with all the typos in the text and regex examples, as well as Figures being mismatched with the text (in one case a nonexistent Figure was referred to, and a totally irrelevant Figure was in its place). No coverage of modifier spans. But on the whole, adequate for rank beginners.