Re: Regular Expression Books

On Thursday, June 20, 2002, at 12:47 AM, Dan Lowe wrote:

I know that O'Reilly has a book titled "Mastering Regular Expressions", but I was wondering if there are any other alternatives to this book? I have been using Wrox published books for a while, and really like them, so if anyone knows of one by Wrox, it would be great!

I can't speak for Wrox, but the O'Reilly title is excellent. It covers a lot of the whys and hows of what regular expressions do, too (I never realized there were different flavors under the hood until I read this book). It does go in-depth into Perl, but doesn't cover PHP specifically as far as I recall. Excellent book - one of the most valuable I own (and I've got a shelf and a half of just O'Reilly titles behind me).

Sorry for butting in, but I had to support Dan on this one. This is just an incredible book. And as you read it, keep in mind that -most- Perl-related information is essentially the same as in the PCRE regular expression functions in PHP, so they apply. The only parts that I wouldn't worry about reading in this book are some of the in-depth discussions of how the various languages compare in terms of speed, since PHP isn't one of them. The last two chapters, IIRC, are Perl-specific too. Really, you just need to read the first five chapters of this book (about half the book). This book is on par with the Camel book ("Programming Perl") and "MySQL" by Paul DuBois, which are each indispensable if you use Perl or MySQL respectively. Erik ---- Erik Price Web Developer Temp Media Lab, H.H. Brown pricee@hhbrown.com