Beginning Regular Expressions

Beginning Regular Expressions is about twice the size as Introducing Regular Expressions, however about 1/2 of the content of this book can be completely skipped or ignored. To start, this book is aimed for Windows developers, so all of the examples are Windows centric. While reading this book, I mainly followed along, using grep in Linux. The core regex concepts can be carried over from whatever Windows application is being described in the book, to grep or sed in Linux. So the fact that this book was originally aimed for Windows developers shouldn’t be a major drawback for anyone coming from the Linux or Unix world.

The examples described in this book are fairly outdated (book originally published in 2005), with possibly many being deprecated at this point. For example in the PHP regex chapter, some of the examples were described using the old deprecated PHP 5.x ereg(i), split(i) functions. Speaking of which, I honestly feel showcasing regular expressions in distinct languages is completely unnecessary. This book goes as far as covering regular expressions in JavaScript, VB, VB.Net, C#, Java, PHP, and Perl (of which I skipped reading most all these chapters).

Thus said, the first ten chapters in book are really good. It covers the core regular expression concepts very well. I felt they were more comprehensible compared to Introducing Regular Expressions.

Rating: 3/5

Beginning Regular Expressions

• Chapter 1: Introduction to Regular Expressions
• Chapter 2: Regular Expression Tools and an Approach to Using Them
• Chapter 3: Simple Regular Expressions
• Chapter 4: Metacharacters and Modifiers
• Chapter 5: Character Classes
• Chapter 6: String, Line, and Word Boundaries
• Chapter 7: Parentheses in Regular Expressions
• Chapter 8: Lookahed and Lookbehind
• Chapter 9: Sensitivity and Specificity of Regular Expressions
• Chapter 10: Documenting and Debugging Regular Expressions
• Chapter 11: Regular Expressions with Microsoft Word
• Chapter 12: Regular Expressions in StartOffice/Open Office Writer
• Chapter 13: Regular Expressions Using findstr
• Chapter 14: PowerGREP
• Chapter 15: Wildcards in Microsoft Excel
• Chapter 16: Regular Expressions Functionality in SQL Server 2000
• Chapter 17: Using Regular Expressions with MySQL
• Chapter 18: Regular Expressions in Microsoft Access
• Chapter 19: Regular Expressions in Jscript and JavaScript
• Chapter 20: Regular Expressions and VBScript
• Chapter 21: Visual Basic .Net and Regular Expressions
• Chapter 22: C# and Regular Expressions
• Chapter 23: PHP and Regular Expressions
• Chapter 24: Regular Expressions in W3C XML Schema
• Chapter 25: Regular Expressions in JavaScript
• Chapter 26: Regular Expressions in Perl

Tags: [ regex ]

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