Monday, April 16, 2007

Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition

Book cover

So, after reading positive reviews about it since I started using regular expressions a little over a year ago, I finally purchased O'Reilly Media's Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, after discovering that a third edition came out in August 2006. The book arrived today, and it is indeed pretty damn excellent (I'm as excited about it as I can be about a tech book, anyway). I've only spent a few minutes with it so far, but I can see that it is excellently presented, and there is much to discover. Hopefully I'll post about some cool things I learn over the next few weeks, if I get a chance to actually sit down and read through a significant portion of the book.

2 comments:

josh said...

It's been a week man!

Steve said...

Heh! That may be, but I've only read the first 20 pages of the book so far (worklife has been more hectic than normal recently). I've gotten all the way to the section on basic quantifiers... woohoo! :-P

With work and some personal projects coming up, I may have to shelve this book for a while, unfortunately. That being said, I'm psyched about some planned, regex-related, personal projects I've got planned, including a JavaScript regex tester to end all JavaScript regex testers, and a JavaScript class ("xRegExp", perhaps) which supports advanced regex features not included natively in JavaScript... things like "s" and "x" modifiers, atomic groups/possessive quantifiers, and perhaps even lookbehinds (with the works: positive and negative, variable length, nested, etc.) All of this is vaporware at the moment, but I have some ideas about how it could be pulled off with decent performance, and I think it could be pretty freaking sweet.