Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book finally fills a very important niche, since, before it, there wasn't any entry-level Regular Expression manual worth reading. Friedl's book from O'Reilly is excellent, but not suited for beginners. Ben Forta distilled the essential of the subject inside a compact, easy to follow book. Even seasoned programmers often consider the topic arcane, but the author brilliantly managed to cover it in a way that can be easily understood by everybody and still being relevant (avoiding the pitfalls so typical of "dummies" manuals). Every chapter revolves around a set of practical examples, evolving in a linear way, from the very basic up to a few more sophisticated techniques covered inside the last two chapters.
Forta covers Regular Expressions in a language and implementation agnostic way; the result is worth reading regardless of the language/platform you use. It's a small, handy manual that makes the power of Regular Expressions accessible to everybody. Heartily recommended!

Don't be fooled by the book's catchy title, obviously courtesy of Sams marketing department. Just reading through the book's 138 pages will take more than 10 minutes. But if you're willing to sit down with this book for an hour or two, you can certainly learn to write regular expressions that do what you want.

The book consist entirely of a gently paced tutorial that walks you through all the elements of the regular expression syntax, starting out with the most basic elements, advancing all the way to advanced features such as lookaround and conditionals. Each chapter introduces one element, clearly describing it, with several detailed examples. Almost all features of Perl-compatible regular expressions (also used by PHP, Python, JavaScript, Java, .NET, etc.) are discussed.

Obviously, such a small book cannot be comprehensive. Even though the book's cover mentions a variety of programming languages, the book does not tell you at all how to actually use regular expressions with particular programming languages or tools. For that, you'll need to refer to the documentation that comes with the software you're using, or check out the web site at http://www.regular-expressions.info/tools.html

The book also doesn't explain regular expression features such as matching Unicode characters or named capture. These features are only supported by a small number of regular expression flavors.

If you're completely new to regular expressions, Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes will get you up to speed quickly. I would definitely recommend you get yourself a copy. But if you're already familiar with regular expressions, you'll need to look elsewhere for in-depth information.

I was looking for a guide that teaches me how to use regular expressions. This book seems to do the trick. It starts with simple commands to more and more complex commands. I really like the fact that it is using the same examples over and over again.This way way you can compare the long statements using simple commands with the more sophisticated short statements that accomplish the same task.
Unfortunately, regular expression differ for each development environment (.NET, javascript, Perl, etc.). Although the book tries very hard to explain the differences I can imagine it can be confusing from time to time.
In my case a book about regular expressions using .NET would be more suitable. However, the reviews of the books that cover this topic where not so good.
Another bad point about the book is that it is less suitable to use as a reference. Then again, if you are looking for a book that teaches you how to use regular expressions this is a book worth taking a look at.

Regular Expressions is a mechanism for working with strings and text. It's a powerful language for different kinds of matching within the text. For example to match e-mail address one could use the following RegEx: (\w+\.)*\w+@(\w+\.)+[A-Za-z]+

For a person not familiar with Regular Expressions it probably looks complicated. This book educates how to build regular expressions like that and other kinds, and it does it very well.

The book quickly explains fundamentals, and starts teaching Regular Expressions from the easiest examples, building up to more advanced topics gradually. The chapters are structured as lessons that allow developers to get up to speed with Regular Expressions quickly, at the same time the book doubles as a handy reference.

Advancement of .NET technology, which includes built in support for Regular Expressions, opens up new possibilities for programming with languages that previously had no Regular Expressions support, or such support had to be obtained through third party libraries, often limited. That's why Regular Expressions are as popular as ever, and this book does a great job brining developers up to speed with this exciting and time saving tool.

Ben has done a great job with this informative, straightforward and concise text. He writes in a way that allows the reader to gain a an understanding of the basics of regex and then build on that knowledge. I'd recommend this book to the regex beginner as a first text and they will be able to implement useful regexes in a very short time. If necessary, you could follow this text up with Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions, second edition.

This book is destined be the go-to guide for anyone who needs a tutorial on regex basics that start at Square 1. If you know nothing about regular expressions and want to get up to speed fast this is the book for you. Like the author's SQL guide, it is written in a concise, thorough fashion with baby-step-by-step examples and illustrations that will walk you through the very basic stuff, moving up in complexity as you go along. The book is organized in short lessons that build on one another, and are easy to handle even if you only have a few minutes to spare every day. And you'll find it easy to keep reading given the understandable, engaging writing style. This book makes what was a mystically difficult topic a joy to *finally* figure out.

When I started to discuss the topic of regular expressions to my students I noticed some fear and eyes starting to glaze over so I went and purchased a copy for every student in my class. It was small and affordable. Now I have a class room of students that are on their way to being savvy programmers or at least ones smart enough to keep a copy of this book nearby whenever arcane syntax like an RE passes their way. I highly recommend this book for folks learning all about regular expressions.

I purchased this based upon the reviews that were very good, but if you are looking to buy this for the Kindle, don't!. The examples are listed in such a way that you can't read them on the Kindle. The regular expression matches are listed by showing the matches with a light gray behind the match. You can't see it at all on the Kindle. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't making sense to me, so I got my hands on a printed version and saw what I was missing was the whole key to the book.

Regular expressions come up in many popular editors, search engines,and parsers. Knowing regular expressions can make your favorite tool even more of a favorite. Knowing them as a programmer can also make you a more productive programmer. Instead of writing your own parser, simply use a regular expression with your favorite programming language such as PERL, PHP, Java, Python, etc.

This book is a very handy guide to get you up and running quickly
with regular expressions. It's not comprehensive but it's likely to tell you just what you need to know 90% of the time. It quickly, concisely covers the basics: pattern matching for single, multiple, or sets of characters, repeats, certain types of characters such as digits, the nth occurrence, and nesting. The book has examples of everything it covers with a thoughtful analysis.

As a surprise bonus, this book comes with two appendices. It tells you how to use regular expressions in popular tools and languages such as grep, MySQL, and Java. It also gives the pattern matches for common items such as zip codes, phone numbers, IP addresses, e-mails, comments, and credit card numbers. I recommend this book to anyone who ever needs to find a string quickly out of a bunch of text.

After reading this clearly written little book you will have a good understanding of what regex expressions are all about as well as a serviceable command of syntax. Follow it up with Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions," which will be a breeze with Forta's crash course under your belt, and you will be well on your way to guru-dom.