Customer Reviews

Regular Expression Recipes for Windows Developers: A Problem-Solution Approach

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When I saw the title of this book, I was excited at the prospect of a book filled with detailed regular expression examples. Unfortunately, it didn't pan out that way.

Spread over a whopping 359 pages, the book lists exactly 100 tasks that you can accomplish with a regular expression. As the solution, the author not only gives a regular expression, but also a complete source code snippet in C#, VB.NET, JavaScript and VBScript. Not all solutions have snippets in all languages. Some solutions also have a snippet for ASP.NET.

Obviously, the examples have a heavy bias towards Windows and .NET. If you're using open source languages, you may want to look at this book's precursor "Regular Expression Recipies" instead. It's essentially the same book, with almost the same list of recipes, but with examples in Perl, PHP and Python.

Each recipe also has a "how it works" section, essentially transcribing the regular expression in English, similar in approach to RegexBuddy's plain English regex trees, though the book uses a flat description rather than a tree. The descriptions are brief though. While all the source code snippets easily take up two or more pages per recipe, the explanation is often barely half a page long.

The book does suffer from some sloppy editing. The regular expression in the source code snippets isn't always identical to the one in the description. E.g. in recipe 6-21, the JavaScript snippet uses named capture, and the explanation then proceeds to explain a regex without named capture (which isn't supported by JavaScript). Most of these issues are trivial, but it isn't good for a book that's obviously aimed at beginners.

Most of the recipes solve rather basic problems, organized in six chapters. The first, "Words and Text", deals with finding blank lines, repeated words, words at the start or end of a line, etc. The "URLs and Paths" chapter has examples for finding URLs and file paths, and extracting bits from them. The "CSV and tab-delimited files" has a few recipes for converting between the two and extracting fields.

The "Formatting and Validating" chapter shows how to validate numbers, currency, dates, phone numbers, addresses, etc. The "XML and HTML" chapter has recipes for matching and replacing tags and attributes. Finally, the "Source Code" chapter has a bunch of recipes for manipulating software source code and related files. Most of these tasks are odd jobs that .NET programmers may want to do sometimes.

The book would have been a better deal if it had focused on regular expressions, and left out the many lines of source code, not to mention the redundant copies in several languages. Without the source code, a book of the same size could easily contain 300 examples. That would have made it far more useful for programmers who know how to program, but aren't well-versed in regular expressions.

As it is, I can only recommend this book to people who are not only new to regular expressions, but also relatively new to programming. The book does contain many recipes that solve basic problems you're likely to encounter when writing .NET applications or scripts for a web site. If you happen to use C#, VB.NET, JavaScript or VBScript, and are looking for a cookbook approach, you'll certainly find the book useful.

But don't expect to really learn how regular expressions work from this book. If you develop software for a living, you're better of with a good regular expression tutorial such as the one at www.regular-expressions.info or a book like "Mastering Regular Expressions".

Regular expressions are one of the most abstract topics for the average developer to master. Nathan does a real good job of producing something that any developer should be able to start and build their own base library of core expressions.
The approach he takes by presenting some introduction to Regular Expressions, then presenting usable code in three languages is so useful. Regular Expressions are so abstract, but yet so simple the best way to learn them is by example. For me this was the best book on using Regular Expressions in .NET.

This book went over too many different flavors of regular expressions for my taste. I also think it is more oriented to someone who doesn't know or care about how regular expressions work and just wants a quick answer. So if you already know regex fairly well this book won't introduce anything new to you. You can find most of these in the online regex libraries.

The Syntax Overview at the beginning of the book is worth the price alone. Nathan outlines the basic parts of regular expressions and gives you a clear idea of what they are without getting pedantic. This overview isn't even included in the main chapters but rather as an introductory supplement perhaps underestimating its usefulness. Do yourself a favor especially if you are new to regular expressions and read this section first.

After introducing you to the basics the book moves right into real-world examples. Again, no fooling around with fancy scenarios that distract from the purpose of the book. You get a paragraph or two to describe the task at hand and inform you of any assumptions made about the target data and then right into the code. Example code is included for ASP.NET validators, C#, Visual Basic.NET, VBScript and JavaScript for EVERY SINGLE TASK. No fighting with language syntax differences which again would distract you from the expressions.

Following the code examples is a step-by-step description of how it works. Nathan again shows restraint in describing how the expression evaluates using little more than a single line for each part of the expression.

This is a very well-written work that makes an excellent addition to any programmer's bookshelf.

I was searching to a book to give some pratical information about regular expressions. Very cool.