Regular Expressions Questions and Answers

Genuinely excellent — I finished it in a week and immediately started again.

I bought this on a whim after seeing it mentioned in a forum thread, and I am glad I did. The exercises at the end of each chapter are worth doing — they caught a few misconceptions I did not know I had. A couple of chapters felt like they could have been merged, but that is a minor complaint. A few of the examples could be more realistic, but the underlying points come across clearly. I have already recommended it to two colleagues and will recommend it to more.

Exactly the book I needed. Straight to the point and genuinely useful.

There is a particular kind of technical book that is dense without being difficult, and this is one of them. I appreciated the honesty about what the book does not cover — it saved me from expecting things that were not there. Some of the diagrams are dense and I had to reread a few sections, though that may just be me. This is the book I wish had existed when I started working with regular expressions.