Friedl’s book is absolutely awesome. Really. I don’t agree with the negative comments that seem to pop up all of a sudden now. Sounds like rather cheap criticism to me.
That said, I haven’t read this new Regex Cookbook (yet). Hearing you say that it replaces Friedl’s book as the go-to reference for regular expressions, makes me very curious, though.
I seriously learned how to craft and maintain regular expressions with Jeffrey’s “Mastering Regular Expressions” book. I do think it is one of the most valuable books I’ve ever read!
I do love the cookbook style & format from O’Reilly, but would recommend “Mastering Regular Expressions” as the definite guide in understanding how to create/read regular expressions.
I guess them’s the breaks…
If you think the world will come to an end if Jeff Atwood makes a buck or two from an Amazon.com affiliate link, you can always visit the book’s official site at www.regexcookbook.com and give the affiliate percentage to the authors, or you can visit www.amazon.com directly and let Amazon keep the profit.
My own opinion is that if you discovered our book on Jeff’s blog, then Jeff is more than welcome to get the 6% or 7% commission that Amazon pays. Writing a blog with useful content is a lot of work. The more his blog helps feed him his family, the more incentive he has to keep doing it.
It’s a fallacy to think that bloggers can make money by recommending books they don’t actually like just to get affiliate commissions. Those bloggers quickly find themselves without readers.
Great Book… Now can you use regex to eliminate the Tards that post First replies??? That would be an awesome use of Regex!
If you think the world will come to an end if Jeff Atwood makes a buck or two from an Amazon.com affiliate link, you can always visit the book’s official site at www.regexcookbook.com and give the affiliate percentage to the authors, or you can visit www.amazon.com directly and let Amazon keep the profit.
Or one can simply click the banner of yours that slyly appeared (unethically in my mind) at the top of the O’rielly page for Mr. Friedl’s vastly superior Mastering Regular Expressions. Why earn excellence when you can simply purchase banner impressions eh? You’ve have owls plastered over everything with that banner, as well as all things regex related at your own site - I dub it ‘Owl Envy’.
I’ve read both books and like them both, but MRE3 is a far better tutorial. (I too, pre-ordered Jan’s new book sight unseen based on my love of EditPad Pro, RegexBuddy and PowerGrep. Jan is a software genius IMHO.) But if you want to MASTER regular expressions, you are going to need to spend quite a bit of TIME STUDYING the intricacies of just how the underlying engine really works in order to craft regexes that work REALLY well (i.e. matching what you want and not matching what you don’t want and doing so QUICKLY). Friedl’s MRE3 is the one to study if you want to truly become a regex GURU (the Slashdot review gave it 11 out of 10 and I agree 100%). “Regular Expressions Cookbook” is not the kind of book you read cover to cover (although the first two chapters are meant to be read that way). It is the book you go to if you are not a master and simply need a quick regex solution that is both accurate and efficient. (If you are a master, you can easily come up with your own custom-fit recipes!) Although it can be used as a tutorial, that is not its primary focus - However it EXCELS as a cookbook and as a regex reference.
And I disagree with those who say Friedl’s book is dry. I found it quite entertaining, given the subject matter (and yes, there is even some humor in there!) On the other hand I found Jan’s book to be dryer and more encyclopedic in its full coverage of all modern regex flavors across many different recipes. To its credit, the “Cookbook” covers the Javascript flavor (which is missing in MRE) but omits coverage of the recursive expressions found in the recent versions of PHP/PCRE (which is covered in MRE3).
Buy them both and make up your own mind. They are each very good at what they aim to do.
As the Delphi R&D Manager, I have to add that Jan Goyvaerts is a Delphi developer and his excellent tools are all built using Delphi.
Nick
Tom,
The RegexBuddy advertisement you’re referring to is simply an ad that runs on Google’s AdWords network using the keyword “regular expressions”. If a web site uses Google’s AdSense to display ads and Google determines that the site has content relevant to “regular expressions”, then the RegexBuddy ad is likely to appear. Whether it does depends on a lot of factors.
There’s nothing sly about it. Webmasters can easily block ads from www.regexbuddy.com or remove AdSense completely if they feel the ads are inappropriate. But I think most are happy to make an extra buck.
Been a reader for a while but just bought this on your recommendation, RegEx has never quite been accepted by my brain, hopefully this will finally do it!
Oh, well, 1st edition and a lot of teething troubles: http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9780596520694
I’ll wait for the 2nd edition and in the meanwhile I read Friedl 
(I know: http://regex.info/errata3.html )
This is such a blatant ad. I’ll never get comfortable with this kind of maneuvers with so blatantly disgusting wordings. Five years have passed, has Jeff replaced Mastering Regular Expressions on his list with Regular Expressions Cookbook? NO! Even though advertising, Jeff is not advertising with hearts. He can’t even cheat himself. What a pathetic joke. I would likely not visit this blog any more. How am I gonna trust its contents at all?
I finally updated the reading list. This is the superior reference book. Sorry about that. 
