Jeffrey E. F. Friedl

Regular expressions, unless you’re a mathematician or a computer scientist, are fairly irregular things. What started as ways to write patterns to match strings of characters has grown out of control, especially with regexes (as they’re called) being a fundamental part of the Perl programming language.

Friedl presents here the most comprehensive covering of regexes that can possibly be put in bound book form. The first six chapters will give you everything you need to learn and hopefully understand regexes, while the latter chapters give you insight into language/framework-specific implementations of them (including Perl, Java, PHP and .NET).

Having dealt with regexes a lot in the past, this book did not wow or amaze me. It did, however, provide some useful tips for future regex writing. If you’re a regex newb, it would be greatly useful, especially if you’re planning on writing a lot of regexes. If you’re a seasoned veteran, it may be beneficial to skim this book, but by no means skip it, unless your name happens to be Jeffrey Friedl.

My only complaint with this book is that most of the .NET examples are in the abomination of a “programming language” called Visual Basic. Why such a language even still exists in beyond me. However, since VB is part of .NET, most of the examples can be trivially translated into more meaningful languages, such as C#.

I would highly recommend this book for anybody who dedicates any reasonable amount of time towards constructing regular expressions, as well as to anybody who spends an inordinate amount of time writing methods/functions/subroutines to handle complex (that is, more than “this string equals this string”) string matching. Regular expressions will save you countless hours, since somebody’s done all that heavy lifting for you already!… (more)