Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes 1st Edition

Regular Expressions are incredibly powerful text parsing tools. But as with almost everything, using the tools regularly is essential to maintaining and building proficiency. Of course, there are ways to work around that and this is one of them. Not only is the book an extremely good introduction to Regular Expressions and the Regular Expressions Language, but it is also very helpful as a very quick refresher course. Forta intends his book to be an introduction to Regular Expressions. In fact - and this shows you the nature of the man - Forta suggests another book from another publisher (Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions) to those who want more information. In ten chapters, Forta walks the reader through the basics of understanding what Regular Expressions are, how they can be used and how to use them. Overall, this is a great introduction to Regular Expressions, their user and how to forumulate them. Excellent for your first introduction or for refreshing the skills of the infrequent user.Jerry

I'm sorry to give only four stars to this great book that enlightened me into the world of regular expressions. I bought it to read it on Kindle, but all the highlightings in the book regarding the matching of the regular expressions (exactly the most important thing to understand the provided examples) are not visible on Kindle (I have a Kindle PaperWhite 2nd gen). The only reason I don't fight for a refund from Amazon is that the book is so good explained, I was able to understand from the author explanations what were the highlighted results. Amazon, please fix this book, it is NOT compatible with Kindle.Thank you for this excellent book, Mr. Forta

I have bought and given away multiple copies of this book. Biggest advantages:1. It is short.2. It is cheap.3. It is conceptual, not language-specificIf you have access to the Internet, you can easily find free tutorials and reference guides and even tools for using regular expressions. Why would you need a book!?! Because almost all of the free resources start with something like this "The period (.) matches any character. Use the backslash (\) to escape special characters" etc. etc.But that is not teaching someone how to use regular expressions, it is just teaching syntax. Useful, but IMO not the right place to start.I think that one needs to understand the purpose of regular expressions and how/why to use them - before getting into the arcane syntax. Another thing that the book illustrates is how to avoid matching things you *don't* want, as well as matching the things you *do* want. IMO, this kind of thinking is important but rarely taught.If you already know regular expressions, then this is not the book for you. But if you are new to regular expressions and you like to learn by example - buy this book. It will take you more than 10 minutes. But if you work through the entire book, you will understand regular expressions better than most people.

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!

Regular expressions are widely used in many different programming environments (e.g., java), but many typical programming guides don't actually devote much (if any) attention to describing how regular expressions work and how they can be used. I realize that there are many free resources available on the web to learn about regular expressions, but they are not necessarily well organized nor do they facilitate quick, topical instruction on a specific aspect of regular expressions while also providing a good overview of the entire system. As someone who has spent more than a little bit of time trying to figure out exactly how to do something specific with regular expressions, I have definitely appreciated the contribution that this small book makes to the field. The book is also not nearly as expensive as many other reference books, and the Kindle version is even more affordable.

I would like to echo other's reviews that this is a great, concise primer to get started with Regex. I will also concur with those that pointed out that the highlighting format for Regex results doesn't work with the standard e-ink eReaders. However, the analysis is written so clearly that it wasn't too difficult to imagine what was highlighted. Therefore, I only knocked off one star.Don't forget that using either the Kindle for desktop or Kindle cloud reader apps work just fine, so the pdf version isn't really necessary.

Let's state it first, as the author points out, this is not an in depth review of the mechanisms that go on behind the scenes, this will get you on top of 99% of what you'll ever find out there.This book covers expressions extensively and more than any tutorial you'll find on the internet, it's just more than enough if you don't mind the how it does that, you just want the job done. For every kind of expression there are three pages with examples and explanation. I advice fiddling with Regexr during the process.Invaluable.I usually don't leave many reviews there are plenty of resources for whatever project you are up to, but delivering this much in the little effort of few hours is outstanding.

Para quem é iniciante, o texto é bem objetivo e claro. O livro serve também como referência para os já iniciados.

A basic but exhaustive lesson on regular expressions. Well developed and explained, useful as daily guide to use. Only limited at time of aplying to diverse languages. But at this time, you have the required to get directions on your own.

Usually I never like titles like "learn something in 10 minutes" But this is an exception. The contents are excellent for refreshing and very quick reference regular expressions, its well written, and too easy to understand.

Ce livre est d'après moi la meilleure façon d'apprendre à utiliser les expressions régulières. Il est facile à comprendre et donne beaucoup d'exemple.