Rating: 

Description
Written in the lucid, entertaining tone that makes a complex, dry topic become crystal-clear to programmers, and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition offers a wealth of information that you can put to immediate use.

The description above is quite an understatement. Even the full description does not do this book justice. Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition is almost a classic and should be on your bookshelf, chained down. If your programming friends, coworkers, or enemies try to borrow this book, beware. It takes quite a while to get it back, even bent, spindled and mutilated so you might not want it back [yeah that was actually tried]. You might try a rule about using it at your desk, but that did not work for me either.

My experience agreed with almost everything written, except that I do not have the in depth use of RegEx the author clearly has. I wish I was on the same page with him in experience with RegEx. I started with RegEx in college in the early 90s and remember six projects that I had to do that could have been much easier with this book. My programming experience used RegEx on occasion but not with the power explained in this book. I appreciate the detailed and thorough comparisons of the languages. The only word I really missed in the INDEX and Table of Contents was: SECURITY. Using RegEx to make sure security issues are properly handled would really help many programmers and developers.

The topics start with a Preface, then moves to Introduction to Regular Expressions, then Extended Introductory Example, then Overview of Regular Expression Features and Flavors, then The Mechanics of Expression Processing, then the Practical Regex Techniques, then Crafting an Efficient Expression, then Perl, Java, .NET, PHP, and finally the Index. Remember to read the Preface, it is very interesting. The author makes some points about how to read the book [the first six chapters] and how to THINK.

The 10 chapters are written very thoroughly. I like that about this book. Explanations of history and trivia are all over the place but are written like a story and easy to read. The figures are good and useful in the explanation of the concepts. The code is usually more than a few lines. This is a more complicated book and requires more expressive code examples.

The topics are useful and helpful in just about any language, including the more recent powerful languages like .NET and Java.

I thought the discriminations made about the different languages that use Regular Expressions went from general to specific in a hurry. Even so, the book is pretty long and needs to be digested in discrete chunks. No way to read this in one evening. There is no way to digest the concepts and comparisons very fast, at least for me. This is valuable knowledge worth your time to read and digest as thoroughly as possible.

The 540+ pages were easy to read and understand, partly told as a story. I read it in one week. There were a few typos and grammar errors, but not very many. The book is for someone who is a beginner or an expert and needs to know the specific times when one regular expression has even a slight benefit over another. More experienced people should look it over to make sure they are up to speed with this author.

I would give this book 5 out of 5 stars. Definitive!!!!!

Frederick J Eccher Jr
MBA
M.S. Management of Information Systems
A.B. Psychology
B.A. Biology
President, Board of Directors, Saint Louis Visual Basic Users Group
rick@stlvbug.net
November 26, 2006