Who picks the covers for these books, that’s what I want to know.
If you are in India, just go to www.regular-expressions.info for free. It’s probably 60% as good as the book for free. You will have no trouble learning it from that.
Also, a good (free with registration) testing program for .NET is Expresso.
Perl may not have invented regexes, but it’s done more to advance the state of the art than anything else. Have you seen what Perl 6 is doing with them? Check out http://perlcabal.org/syn/S05.html for the full scoop. Prepare to have your mind blown.
I’ve never been a fan of the classic regular expression reference
book, Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions. I found it dry, a
bit academic
[ laughter ]
Yup, that’s Friedl’s book. Academic. Reads like a tour through the classic techniques of regular expression; between the tour of the hierarchies of grammars and the detailed discussion of Brzozowski minimization, I practically got a nosebleed.
No doubt I’m in the minority here but…
Bought the PDF, read it, and while its alright, the constant references to Jan’s software don’t sit well with me somehow. Reads like a infomercial. No disrespect intended here honestly, just not my cup of tea.
I’ve found O’Reilly’s book on * grep more practical. Has several real world examples, recipes section, etc. Plus grep is free without references to additional software I’d rather not purchase. All in all, Regular Expressions Cookbook is not bad, but not great. I feel Jeff could’ve better served his readership with some examples from the book to justify his praise of it too. But hey - that’s life.
*Think about it… g/re/p
There’s often value in having both the “academic treatise” and the “getting things done” book - I’d suggest that those really interested in regex may get something out of both 
“You know, sometimes I wonder, whether you’re being paid to advertise these books.” - AbdulSattar
If he was, there would be no need for ouches!
“You know, sometimes I wonder, whether you’re being paid to advertise these books.”
Whilst I’m sure Jeff is above suspicion in this regard, I do wonder about the ethics of using referrals without full disclosure. There must be a conflict of interest when someone is earning a share of the profits of something they review.
Oh, and what have you got against shrews?
Is there a recipe in the Cookbook for eliminating useless posts like, “First!”?
When I look at the URL address of the link to the book on amazon you posted, I see a ‘tag=codinghorror-20’. What does that mean?
Strongly recommended tool for regexing: Regex Coach (->google). with it, you can learn, validate and use regexes. a cool tool if i’ve ever seen one. plus, it’s freeware.
Jeff is making money through amazon kickbacks.
If you buy the book using that link, Jeff earns a percentage on what you spend.
@seth: “By the way, @DevMan: that’s actually why the name is very good. It describes the academic properties of these expressions: RE (BRE or ERE)”
Except regexs in real languages rarely are regular. Once you have backreferences, you no longer have a regular expression.
(Alternatively, it’s still a regular expression, by a different definition, and you just break the property you extol of it being properly descriptive.)
… I see a ‘tag=codinghorror-20’. What does that mean?
That is an amazon referral link and he might get a couple of pennies if you buy it at that time. You will see similar looking tags on other sites as well. I don’t know about Jeff’s case, but another blog says it buys them a couple books/year.
Is there a recipe in the Cookbook for eliminating useless posts like, “First!”?
There was a site I used to watch for the shear train-wreck-in-progress nature of the place: f*dcompany.com. They’d replace “first” with “boobies” and add random time to the timestamp of the post (like 12hrs or a couple days, so it ends up way down the thread).
He gets far more than a couple of pennies – he’d get over a dollar to three dollars per purchase, which can be very rewarding if such a popular blog convinced a lot of people to buy the book.
Getting a loyal following and then monetizing them from Amazon sales is one of the most lucrative tactics around.
Having said that, there is nothing wrong with Jeff doing that. If he likes the book and wants to speak nicely about it, and it wasn’t the motivation behind pimping people to buy a book (personally I think about 99.999% of this field’s books are trash and are unrecommendable. You’re almost always better off with Google searches and experimentation), then he might as well benefit from it.
I’m alread a regex fan. I’ll be getting this book. Thanks for the tip.
It’s always good to praise a book. But, if you comparatively praise a book without proper substantiation, then it’s sounds like a sales effort.
Jeff, it takes a lot of time and effort to write a book. The authors strive hard to put together their knowledge in writing so that it is easy for other people to learn. It takes months of effort, for virtually no monetary return. Criticizing such an effort makes you look like a cheap f**ker.
ill try the book, i know regex, but not the advance regex(lookaheads and stuff), so maybe i will learn them this time.
Might enjoy David Seruyange’s ‘Nregex’ - nline RegEx Evaluator and playground as referenced by Hanselminutes.
Jeff, I wasn’t wondering what the $&!@( that was on the front cover. I was wondering what the /^\w+$/!