Programmer Musings

Review of Mastering Regular Expressions

Mastering Regular Expressions
Jeffery E. F. Friedl
O'Reilly, 1997

If you use regular expressions on a regular basis, or if you've used them a little but want to get better, this is a book you need. I had been working with regular expressions for over ten years when I first read this book. I was used to helping other people debug their regular expressions and thought I knew them very well. This book improved my regular expressions tremendously.

The book covers multiple regular expression implementations, including AWK, grep, Tcl, GNU Emacs and Perl 5 regular expressions. Friedl does a good job of covering basic regular expression concepts before going on to more advanced topics. Some of these include different types of regexp engines and their effects on the expressions you write, and greediness. He covers some regexp gotchas including regular expressions that may never terminate.

Throughout the book are a number of useful techniques that will improve your daily use of regular expressions.

Mastering Regular Expressions is highly recommended.