Introducing Regular Expressions

Introducing Regular Expressions, is as it names implies, an introductory book to Regular Expressions. This book assumes you don’t have much knowledge in Regular Expressions. Regex’s are somewhat of an extremely complex topic, and although this book is just an introduction to them, I definitely learn a few new things.

This book starts of teaching the basic concepts of regular expressions, you’ll learn important regex concepts like character classes, metacharacters, grouping, backrefernces, quantifiers, etc. Each chapter progresses on top of what each topic was covered, so it’s not a good idea to skip ahead! I really enjoyed that practically all of the examples covered in this book were using grep, sed, and perl, since these are tools that I use practically almost on a daily basis.

I’ve been using regular expressions for almost as long as I’ve been using Linux (14+ years), and I’ve learned new topics that I wasn’t very much knowledgeable in like lookarounds. Also, I’ve been lucky to work only with ASCII characters for all the regular expressions that I’ve needed to write. This book does an excellent job describing how to work with Unicode characters using foreign language as examples. Finally, I learned how the the regex engine underneath the hood works when we pass in lazy, greedy, and possessive quantifier expressions to our regex patterns.

Rating: 3/5

Introducing Regular Expressions: Understanding Regular Expressions, Step-by-Step

• Chapter 1: What Is a Regular Expression?
• Chapter 2: Simple Pattern Matching
• Chapter 3: Boundaries
• Chapter 4: Alternation, Groups, and Backreferences
• Chapter 5: Character Classes
• Chapter 6: Matching Unicode and Other Characters
• Chapter 7: Quantifiers
• Chapter 8: Lookarounds
• Chapter 9: Marking Up a Document with HTML
• Chapter 10: The End of the Beginning

Tags: [ regex ]

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