August 2012
Intermediate to advanced
609 pages
19h 16m
English
Content preview from Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Caught in the Snarls of Different Versions
As with anything that becomes popular in the IT industry, regular expressions come in many different implementations, with varying degrees of compatibility. This has resulted in many different regular expression flavors that don’t always act the same way, or work at all, on a particular regular expression.
Many books do mention that there are different flavors and point out some of the differences. But they often leave out certain flavors here and there—particularly when a flavor lacks certain features—instead of providing alternative solutions or workarounds. This is frustrating when you have to work with different regular expression flavors in different applications or programming languages.
Casual statements in the literature, such as “everybody uses Perl-style regular expressions now,” unfortunately trivialize a wide range of incompatibilities. Even “Perl-style” packages have important differences, and meanwhile Perl continues to evolve. Oversimplified impressions can lead programmers to spend half an hour or so fruitlessly running the debugger instead of checking the details of their regular expression implementation. Even when they discover that some feature they were depending on is not present, they don’t always know how to work around it.
This book is the first book on the market that discusses the most popular and feature-rich regular expression flavors side by side, and does so consistently throughout the book.
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.