Beginning Regular Expressions

Rating:
Summary: Great breadth of languages, tools, and examples
Review: 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