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Regular Expressions Cookbook--New from O'Reilly Media: Detailed Solutions in Eight Programming Languages

May 28, 2009

Sebastopol, CA—Every programmer can find uses for regular expressions, but their power doesn't come worry-free. Even seasoned users often suffer from poor performance, false positives, false negatives, or perplexing bugs. Regular Expressions Cookbook (O'Reilly Media, $44.99 USD) offers step-by-step instructions for some of the most common tasks involving this tool, with recipes for C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET.

Many books have been published to ride the wave of regular expression adoption. Most do a good job of explaining the regular expressions syntax along with some examples and a reference. But there aren't any books that present solutions based on regular expressions to a wide range of real-world practical problems dealing with text on a computer and in a range of Internet applications. This cookbook provides more than 100 recipes to help you crunch data and manipulate text with regular expressions.

With the help of this book, you will:

  • Understand the basics of regular expressions through a concise tutorial
  • Use regular expressions effectively in several programming and scripting languages
  • Learn how to validate and format input
  • Manage words, lines, special characters, and numerical values
  • Find solutions for using regular expressions in URLs, paths, markup, and data exchange
  • Learn the nuances of more advanced regex features
  • Understand how regular expressions' APIs, syntax, and behavior differ from language to language
  • Write better regular expressions for custom needs

Whether you're a novice or an experienced user, Regular Expressions Cookbook will help deepen your knowledge of this unique and irreplaceable tool. You'll learn powerful new tricks, avoid language-specific gotchas, and save valuable time with this huge library of proven solutions to difficult, real-world problems.

Advance Praise
"This is a well-researched book, full of information. I learned a number of new tricks just by reading the introductory chapter."
--Nikolaj Lindberg, computational linguist, STTS Speech Technology Services

"'Regular Expressions Cookbook' provides elegant solutions for immediate problems. Overall, I am stunned at the attention to detail in the recipes."
--Zak Greant, open technology advocate and strategist

For a review copy or more information please email maryr@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.

Jan Goyvaerts runs Just Great Software, where he designs and develops some of the most popular regular expression software. His products include RegexBuddy, the world's only regular expression editor that emulates the peculiarities of 15 regular expression flavors, and PowerGREP, the most feature-rich grep tool for Microsoft Windows.

Steven Levithan is a leading JavaScript regular expression expert and runs a popular regular expression centric blog at http://blog.stevenlevithan.com. Expanding his knowledge of the regular expression flavor and library landscape has been one of his hobbies for the last several years.

Additional Resources:
For more information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic, see: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596520687

Regular Expressions Cookbook
Jan Goyvaerts, Steven Levithan
ISBN: 9780596520687, 510 pages,
Book Price: $44.99 USD, £30.99 GBP
Ebook Price: $31.99 USD

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