Metadata#
- Author(s): Jeffrey E.F. Friedl
- Number of pages: 542
- Year published: 2006
- Year read: 2017
Review#
Mwah, mwah! Thank you, Jeff Friedl, for finally - FINALLY - demystifying this most crucial of meta-programming skills: regular expressions. I had tried online tutorials, videos, even a retro bash game, this and that. Nothing ever helped. This did. FINALLY. FINALLY!
So I didn’t “read” the whole book, but whatever, the second half is reference material for languages I never use nor plan to use (Perl, PHP, etc.). Honestly, the first 2-3 chapters were sufficient; once he got into the guts of different regex languages, I felt like I was teleported back to 1983 Bay Area, sitting next to Steve Wozniak as he pecked at his clackety-clack keyboard and wrote the original BSD man pages. Awwww myyyannn, I just did man grep to double-check my facts and DAMMIT the last update to the grep man page was 2010!!!! Way to kill my joke, Unix.
Henyyyway. Highly recommended, though YMMV - people learn in diff ways. I had been daunted by regexes since the 2009 Stata days, and I just WISH I had had this then.
For my future reference (and yours), a muscle must be exercised, and here are some regex games:
- https://alf.nu/RegexGolf
- https://regexcrossword.com/
- https://www.hackerrank.com/dashboard has a bunch
- https://github.com/bchartoff/regexcalibur (the bash game)