Rating:  Summary: Perfect book for the intermediate regex coder... Review: It's nearly impossible to memorize all the minutiae of regular expressions, especially over multiple language implementations. Tony Stubblebine's book Regular Expression Pocket Reference by O'Reilly is a nice way to help you out without digging through endless pages.
Chapter List: About This Book; Introduction To Regexes And Pattern Matching; Perl 5.8; Java (java.util.regex); .NET And C#; Python; PCRE Lib; PHP; vi Editor; JavaScript; Shell Tools; Index
Like most pocket references, this book is small (93 pages), but there's a lot of information packed into a small space. Each implementation chapter covers the metacharacters and metasequences that are supported in the language's implementation of regular expressions. This is followed by the language functions, examples of regular expressions, and a list of additional resources the reader can use to learn more about regular expressions in that language. If you don't know anything about the subject, this book (in my opinion) isn't going to help you out much. It assumes that you already understand the material and you're looking for a reference guide to find quick answers. And that's fine. This book has a definite purpose and target audience, and I think it does a very nice job of hitting the mark.
For me, this would be a perfect companion book to Mastering Regular Expressions (also by O'Reilly). Mastering is considered one of the definitive volumes on the subject, and having this pocket guide on hand to jog your memory on lesser-used points would be perfect.
Rating:  Summary: very useful little book Review: Nice compendium, flip thru this before tackling Friedl's Reg Ex book. Pocket refs're 7" high, <100 pages, so there's lots that could be added, some things to cut out.- hilite significant diffs betw perl 5.8 & other regex modules e.g. MatchEvaluator delegates, or PHP's /U modifier. In particular, compare perl, java.util.regex & C#. - either add emacs, or cut out vi. If you keep vi, hilite diffs betw vim & vi. - mention performance issues (grouping, lookbehinds, stuff like that) - mention deprecated modules to avoid: python regex, PHP's ereg_ functions Aside from that, it's nice to have a portable summary of perl, python, C#, java and PHP, along with refs to Friedl's book.
Rating:  Summary: Regarding the DavidPerry Review Review: Nice cut and paste of the Ann Coulter book review. I particularly liked the "Menckenesque invective" comment which made me think that I had remembered reading it somewhere before. Anyway, I just wanted the readers of these reviews to know not to trust that one. Some people actually use these reviews to make a choice and avoid wasting money.
Rating:  Summary: Regarding the DavidPerry Review Review: Nice cut and paste of the Ann Coulter book review. I particularly liked the "Menckenesque invective" comment which made me think that I had remembered reading it somewhere before. Anyway, I just wanted the readers of these reviews to know not to trust that one. Some people actually use these reviews to make a choice and avoid wasting money.
Rating:  Summary: Regarding the DavidPerry Review Review: Nice cut and paste of the Ann Coulter book review. I particularly liked the "Menckenesque invective" comment which made me think that I had remembered reading it somewhere before. Anyway, I just wanted the readers of these reviews to know not to trust that one. Some people actually use these reviews to make a choice and avoid wasting money.
Rating:  Summary: Great reference, but not a tutorial Review: The editorial blurb on this book suggests that it can be used as a tutorial by those new to regular expressions. That's not the case. This book is strictly a reference, albeit a very good one. I bought O'Reilly's "Mastering Regular Expressions" to learn the area, and I use this book as a quick reference. It serves that purpose very well.
Rating:  Summary: Much regex info in a small package Review: This book packs a great deal of information into only 93 pages. That may partly be a result of the terseness of most, if not all, of the regular expression syntax; a metasymbol of more than two characters would be considered long-winded! Yet the high information density is likely also due to the manner in which Stubblebine has distilled the operators and rules, as well as the meaning and usage thereof, down to the bare bones. But this does not imply that the book is bereft of examples. Most of the sections contain at least one, and sometimes several, code fragments that illustrate the regex elements under discussion. (...)
Rating:  Summary: Ideal pocket reference Review: This is an ideal pcoket reference for people who need to lookup the details of regular expression syntax. This is not for people who know nothing about regular expressions.
|