Product Description

Regular expressions and the regular expression language have been around for many years. Regular expression experts have long been armed with an incredibly powerful tool, one that can be used to perform all sorts of powerful text processing and manipulation in just about every language and on every platform.

That's the good news. The bad news is that for too long, regular expressions have been the exclusive property of only the most tech savvy. Most of us do not fully understand what regular expressions do and what problems they solve. And those who have braved them find regular expression syntax to be unintuitive, and even convoluted at times. That's sad, because the truth is that regular expressions are nowhere near as complex as they appear to be at first glance. All it takes is a clear understanding of the problem being solved and how to leverage regular expressions so as to solve them.

Part of the problem is the scarcity of quality content on the subject. The few books on regular expressions (and indeed, most of the Web sites boasting regular expression tutorials) tend to concentrate on the syntax, defining what { does and how + differs from *. But that is the easy part; there are not that many special characters in the regular expression language. The tricky part is understanding how they should be used so as to solve real-world problems. If you need to get up and running quickly using regular expressions, you'll find yourself torn between having too little information to be productive and having too much information to know where to begin.

And that is where this book comes in. Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes will teach you the regular expressions that you really need to know, starting with simple text matches and working up to more complex topics, including the use of backreferences, conditional evaluation, and look-ahead processing. You'll learn what you can use, and you'll learn it methodically, systematically, and simply by using clear and practical examples and solving real problems - all in lessons that will each take 10 minutes or less to complete.

To determine if this book is for you, answer these questions: Are you new to regular expressions? Do you want to quickly learn how to get the most out of the regular expression language? Do you want to gain an edge by learning to solve real problems using one of the most powerful (and least understood) tools available to you? Do you build Web applications and crave more sophisticated form and text processing? Are you are a developer (using Perl, ASP, Visual Basic, .NET, C#, Java, JSP, PHP, ColdFusion, and many other languages) and want to learn how to use regular expressions within your own application development? Do you want to be productive quickly and easily in regular expressions without having to call someone for help? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you'll find this little book to be exactly what you've been looking for.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #515954 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

From the Back Cover

RegEx is supported in all major development environments (for use in editing and working with code) and will thus appeal to anyone using these tools. In addition, every JavaScript developer should be using RegEx, but most don't as it has never been taught to them properly before. Developers using ASP, C#, ColdFusion, Java JSP, PHP, Perl, Python, and more can (and should) be using RegEx, and so every one of them is a potential reader too. The reader of this book will learn how to:

* Match characters sets
* Match repeating characters (using minimums and maximums if needed)
* Match (or ignore) based on case
* Build sub-expressions
* Use all of the special characters
* Work with excape sequences
* Use POSIX classes to simplify complex expressions
* Use back-references
* Use look-behind operators

Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes is a tutorial book organized into a series of easy-to-follow 10-minute lessons. These well targeted lessons teach you in 10 minutes what other books might take hundreds of pages to cover. Instead of dwelling on syntax, terminology, and arcane examples and scenarios, this book takes a very hands-on approach to solving the needs of the majority of RegEx users who simply need to manipulate data.

About the Author
Ben Forta is Macromedia Inc.'s Senior Product Evangelist, and has over two decades of experience in the computer industry in product development, support, training, and marketing. Ben is the author of the best-selling ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit and its sequel Advanced ColdFusion Application Development, as well as books on SQL, JavaServer Pages, WAP, Windows development, and more. Over 1/2 million Ben Forta books have been printed in a dozen languages worldwide. Ben co-authored the official Macromedia ColdFusion training material, as well as the certification tests and Macromedia Press study guides for those tests, writes regular columns on ColdFusion and Internet development, and now spends a considerable amount of time lecturing and speaking on application development worldwide.

Customer Reviews

Makes the power of RegExp accessible to everybody
This book finally fills a very important niche, since, before it, there wasn't any entry-level Regular Expression manual worth reading. Friedl's book from O'Reilly is excellent, but not suited for beginners. Ben Forta distilled the essential of the subject inside a compact, easy to follow book. Even seasoned programmers often consider the topic arcane, but the author brilliantly managed to cover it in a way that can be easily understood by everybody and still being relevant (avoiding the pitfalls so typical of "dummies" manuals). Every chapter revolves around a set of practical examples, evolving in a linear way, from the very basic up to a few more sophisticated techniques covered inside the last two chapters.
Forta covers Regular Expressions in a language and implementation agnostic way; the result is worth reading regardless of the language/platform you use. It's a small, handy manual that makes the power of Regular Expressions accessible to everybody. Heartily recommended!

Excellent gentle introduction to regular expression
Don't be fooled by the book's catchy title, obviously courtesy of Sams marketing department. Just reading through the book's 138 pages will take more than 10 minutes. But if you're willing to sit down with this book for an hour or two, you can certainly learn to write regular expressions that do what you want.

The book consist entirely of a gently paced tutorial that walks you through all the elements of the regular expression syntax, starting out with the most basic elements, advancing all the way to advanced features such as lookaround and conditionals. Each chapter introduces one element, clearly describing it, with several detailed examples. Almost all features of Perl-compatible regular expressions (also used by PHP, Python, JavaScript, Java, .NET, etc.) are discussed.

Obviously, such a small book cannot be comprehensive. Even though the book's cover mentions a variety of programming languages, the book does not tell you at all how to actually use regular expressions with particular programming languages or tools. For that, you'll need to refer to the documentation that comes with the software you're using, or check out the web site at http://www.regular-expressions.info/tools.html

The book also doesn't explain regular expression features such as matching Unicode characters or named capture. These features are only supported by a small number of regular expression flavors.

If you're completely new to regular expressions, Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes will get you up to speed quickly. I would definitely recommend you get yourself a copy. But if you're already familiar with regular expressions, you'll need to look elsewhere for in-depth information.

Practical approach how to use regular expressions
I was looking for a guide that teaches me how to use regular expressions. This book seems to do the trick. It starts with simple commands to more and more complex commands. I really like the fact that it is using the same examples over and over again.This way way you can compare the long statements using simple commands with the more sophisticated short statements that accomplish the same task.
Unfortunately, regular expression differ for each development environment (.NET, javascript, Perl, etc.). Although the book tries very hard to explain the differences I can imagine it can be confusing from time to time.
In my case a book about regular expressions using .NET would be more suitable. However, the reviews of the books that cover this topic where not so good.
Another bad point about the book is that it is less suitable to use as a reference. Then again, if you are looking for a book that teaches you how to use regular expressions this is a book worth taking a look at.