The book doesn't just teach you regex, but the why, how AND the dialects. It gives you an overview over different tools and programming languages and their regex-related functions and methods.
On top, it contains a ton of examples, is very well written (considering the insanely dry and difficult to typeset subject :) and is very polished (I think it's in the 3rd edition by now..)
If you just google or experiment on regex, you usally get bad regex, badly crafted regex, brittle regex and make every single mistake the book prevents you from doing.
It's really one of the most worthwhile books of reading through - it's also an excellent handbook to look things up.
Remember that a lot of commandline tools take in regex too - grep, sed, awk, you name it - it's not just for use in programming languages.
Your favorite editor has regex too.
I simple don't know how people can live without; I'm using regex practically every day.
P.S.: And _after_ reading the book, you will understand why people yell at you when you parse HTML with regex but you will know how to do it anyways and at least not completely badly. ;)
The book doesn't just teach you regex, but the why, how AND the dialects. It gives you an overview over different tools and programming languages and their regex-related functions and methods.
On top, it contains a ton of examples, is very well written (considering the insanely dry and difficult to typeset subject :) and is very polished (I think it's in the 3rd edition by now..)
If you just google or experiment on regex, you usally get bad regex, badly crafted regex, brittle regex and make every single mistake the book prevents you from doing.
It's really one of the most worthwhile books of reading through - it's also an excellent handbook to look things up.
Remember that a lot of commandline tools take in regex too - grep, sed, awk, you name it - it's not just for use in programming languages.
Your favorite editor has regex too.
I simple don't know how people can live without; I'm using regex practically every day.
P.S.: And _after_ reading the book, you will understand why people yell at you when you parse HTML with regex but you will know how to do it anyways and at least not completely badly. ;)
P.P.S: And here's the canonical post to BUT OF COURSE you can parse HTML with regex from stackoverflow.. :) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular-expressio...