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According to Wikipedia, "In computing, regular expressions provide a concise and flexible means for identifying strings of text of interest, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters". If you even dabble in open source, shell scripts, and writing code, you are likely at least somewhat aware of regular expressions. Some people are even really good at using regular expressions, but this method can be a struggle for others. O'Reilly's Cookbook series offers over 100 "recipes" using regular expressions to solve common tasks. The question is, will this cookbook help you whip up the dish you need to serve?
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I hate to cave in to the consensus of reviews on the web, but this book is hot! That said, there is a caveat. Despite the fact that the Intended Audience section of the book's front matter states the book is written for anyone who "regularly work(s) with text on a computer, whether that's searching through a pile of documents, manipulating text in a text editor, or developing software...", many of the people who are editing articles, books, or a web page source won't need or want to access the power regular expressions have to offer. Also, a large number of the book's recipes are written for programming languages or for web development, so to make the most out of this book, you'll need to be doing work in those areas. Full Story |
