Preface: When I first dove into regular expressions two years ago, I jumped in head first with Jeffrey Friedl's classic: "Mastering Regular Expressions - 3rd Edition" (MRE3). I've read it twice so far and it is truly a masterpiece (very highly recommended). As I was learning to "think in regex", I needed some reliable tools with which to practice my newfound regex skills (I'm primarily a Windows guy). Although my text editor of choice at the time had three flavors of built-in regex support (UltraEdit32), its support for Perl compatible syntax had a few inconsistencies. A search for better regex tools led me to the EditPad Pro text editor and RegexBuddy, both from "Just Great Software" (JGSoft). These tools proved to be so well designed, bug-free and useful, that I decided to purchase the much more expensive PowerGrep (and was blown away with what I can do with that!) Armed with these tools and my newfound mastery of regular expressions (courtesy of MRE3), I now feel that I could conquer nearly any challenge from the world of text processing. I was very impressed with the quality, accuracy and attention to detail of all the JGSoft's software products, and when the author of these tools announced that he had a new book coming out on regular expressions, I pre-ordered it sight unseen. I knew it would be good. And it is. (Note that I am not affiliated in any way with JGSoft, I am just a very happy user of their software.)

Review: Jan Goyvaerts is one of the world's experts in the field of regular expressions. He is an "attention to details" and "we will serve no wine before its time" kind of guy, so I was not surprised to find "Regular Expressions Cookbook" well organized, accurate, easy to read, and having very few typos and/or grammatical errors. As far as I could tell (and I'm very nit picky), the recipe regexes presented are both accurate and efficient. Each recipe begins with a statement of the problem, the regex solutions, and then followed by an in-depth discussion/explaination of what is going on inside each regex component. And for each "recipe", multiple regexes are typically provided covering a spectrum of specificity (starting with general "easy-matches" moving to the more specific). And regexes are provided for each of the many supported flavors (i.e. .NET, Java, Javascript, PCRE, Perl, Python and Ruby), complete with the required regex modifiers/options. And where appropriate, footnotes are provided that further describe the peculiarities regarding a specific regex flavor. Attempting to cover all modern regex flavors in one book was a tall order, but this book does it well. In addition to the many regex flavors, Chapter 3 covers regex handling with many different programming languages (C#, VB.NET, Java, Javascript, PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby). Although presented in "Cookbook" fashion, the order of the recipes is such that if you start at the beginning (recipes start in Chapter 2), the basics of regular expression syntax are presented in a logical, progressive manner, and thus, this book also functions as an effective tutorial.

However, I'm not personally a big fan of "Cookbook" style books in general, and prefer to learn a subject in depth in a systematic manner, and figure out the recipes later for myself. And in this regard, this "Cookbook" is not the best regex tutorial on the block (go to MRE3 for that). But if you don't have the time or inclination to learn regex in depth, and just need a solution to a specific problem right now, this book will serve up an accurate, efficient regex solution, no matter which tool or regex flavor you are using. And in one regard, the "Cookbook" beats MRE3 because it covers the Javascript flavor (which is not covered at all in MRE3). One other minor "Cookbook" deficiency is that it does not cover the new recursive expressions found in the latest versions of PHP/PCRE.

Note: If you are a Windows regex user, the Regexbuddy program is highly recommended - it has built-in libraries containing nearly all of the regexes provided in this "Cookbook" as well as built-in regex related code snippets for all of the programming languages as well. Its an excellent piece of software and an indispensible aid to the process of learning regular expressions. (It even has a built-in private forum where you can ask questions of the author directly!) And be sure to check out Jan's resource: [...] for free online regex tutorials and reference. Bottom line: Jan knows regular expressions and is very adept at explaining them!

Jan Goyvaerts is well-known in the RegEx community; Steven Levithan somewhat less so. But the degree of fame is unimportant, both are Regular Expressions gurus and really know what they are talking about. Goyvaerts also writes and publishes some really cool software tools, including two for dealing with Regular Expressions.

The last great book on Regular Expressions was "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, also published by O'Reilly. This book does not replace "Mastering Regular Expressions", but complements it. Between the two volumes, you'll know everything of importance worth knowing about Regular Expressions and their use.

Regular Expressions are used to find specific patterns of text. For anyone working extensively with text of any kind, Regular Expressions are as necessary as water and air to sustaining human life. Most people never get behind the primitive search functions of their word processor or spreadsheet program. Too bad: they're missing a lot.

The ugly part of what they're missing is learning how to use Regular Expressions.

Conceptually, Regular Expressions are difficult for many people (like me) to grasp and even more difficult to learn. A big part of that is the staggering power of Regular Expressions ("regexp" or "regexes"). Want to a single search for specific words that are misspelled? Regex. How about sentences beginning or ending with specific words? Use a regex.

In their cookbook, the authors demonstrate more than a hundred examples. Better yet, they do it in seven common regex flavors. The authors claim "Regular Expressions Cookbook" is all you know to learn how to use Regular Expressions. They do start with the basics, but I question whether this book is all most will need. I think consulting one of the many fine Regular Expression tutorials on the web might be a helpful first step for the utter novice.

The cookbook itself is absolutely marvelous.

There are more than one hundred recipes, beginning with matching literal text; advancing through matching previously matched text again; retrieving a list of all matches; validating formats of things like email addresses, international phone numbers, even European VAT numbers; finding words not preceded or followed by a specific word; and much more.

This is, I short, a book for the true geek to curl up with and read. You may not need the information now, but you will need it someday and just browsing is an effective way to pick it up. Likewise, if you're looking for an immediate solution to a problem right now, just check the Table Of Contents. Odds are you'll find what you're looking for or something real close. Sadly, however, the index isn't very good.

In short, this is the newest benchmark reference for Regular Expressions. With this and "Mastering Regular Expressions", you are going to be a Master of the Universe and do things with text that will leave ordinary mortals awestruck.

Jerry

Or I will after using this book! I use bash and powershell at work and hoping to leverage the power of regular expressions I bought this book. It was also recommended by the local linux group.

This book is not for a Regular Expressions Novice which I am. I was hoping for a book that would first explain the concepts and methodoligies before diving into examples. But based on the title of the book I should have know better. The cover states the there is a tutorial but I couldn't find it.

Now that I have the bad part out of the way, the good part is that it gives you a tremendous amount of examples. So if you are looking for a book that gives you the answer on a specific expression this is the book for you.

This is another excellent item in the O'Reilly Cookbook series. It covers a lot of ground and the writing is clear and concise. If you want to get good good at RegEx this this is the book to get.

Even though there's an introductory chapter on RegEx, I think you need to be somewhat familiar with RegEx to make good use of this book. Yu don't need to be an expert to use this book, but I suggest spending time with the chapters 1 and 2, then playing with RegEx on your own before proceeding. The introduction gives you a list of RegEx tools to use. I recommend RegEx Buddy, which I've been using for 4+ years. I was writing my own RegEx application until I found it and decided to save my time for problems that hadn't been solved. RegEx Buddy helps you build RegExs and is also a great testing tool, where you can use real data to verify your design.

I haven't had time to go try everything out in the book, yet, but so far I haven't found mistakes. The book covers the .NET, Java, JavaScript, PCRE, Perl, Python, ad Ruby flavors of RegEx. It give examples in C#, VB.NET, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby. For all intents and purposes VB6 uses the .NET flavor, though the code implementation is not as clean. There are many good online articles that cover this topic (e.g. [...]

The recipes are all practical, some fairly simple, some quite complex. What makes them all useful is the the way they're organized. There' s clear statement of the Problem, followed by an explanation of the Solution with the regular expression (in all flavors) and a specific language example. Section 3.5 gives all the language examples for its problem.

The Discussion sections are the best part of the book. Each recipe gets a through explanation of what goes into the RegEx creation (or the code implementation). You'll learn how to think more effectively in RegEx from these discussions. It's not just the recipes you're getting, but the principles behind designing with RegEx.

The only weak point of the book is that there's not a separate index for the recipes. However, the table of content is sufficient for that.

There are two books that are the bible on RegEx.

Mastering Regular Expressions, by Jeffrey Friedl. (Available in 8 languages!) which is technical, and complete. Then, there is this one. Jan is the maintainer of the regex web site, and author of RegEx Buddy, EditPad Pro, and Regex Magic (and others)

If you are, or want to be a RegEx guru, you need these two books, EditPad Pro and RegEx buddy. The two softwares are tied into each other, and with the book, and the built in help forums in the software, you'll get your RegEx written and working effectively. If you ever have to work, and don't have access to the tools mentioned here, you will feel naked.

This volume provides an in depth discussion on how to incorporate regex programming in several major languages such as C# and VB. Extensive explanations of how to construct the appropriate regex patterns as well as the reasoning behind them are provided with each example It is a very useful resource that you will turn to time and time again when tackling tough text parsing challenges.

This is not a book for a novice to regex.

I find it difficult to understand why the publisher does not understand the importance of fully worked and downloadable code examples. OK I get it that this book is about regex not programming, but that is exactly why I would have expected to find some additional detail and examples as promised in the forward.

> "We have a webpage for this book where we list errata, examples and

> any additional information."

I have been informed by the Publisher that this is simply boilerplate text.

I see no real value in this book unless you are a real pointy head who wants to resolve the nuances of one flavor of regex vs the other. If you actually want to do something using regex, spend your money on regbuddy or one of the other software packages described in the text (it seems to me that is why the authors wrote the book).

Bought this book to get an insight into Regular Expressions.

There are many fine examples of how to use regex, but for someone new to the subject it does take a few skips back and forth to begin to understand why the solutions shown work. A step by step breakdown is not always shown.

Once I'd studied a few more web sites with basic examples of Regex the book began to come into it's own as a very useful reference tool.

I just wanted to point out that this book is good for someone who knows regex already. I wanted to learn regex but I was disappointed because this book doesn't teach you regex from scratch, it's only using it - once you know it (hmmm...). In my case the next book I bought - "Regular Expressions in 10 minutes" - appeared to be the perfect choice.