Regular Expression Pocket Reference Author: Tony Stubblebine Pages: 93 Publisher: O'Reilly ISBN: 0-596-00415-X Summary: A handy, concise companion to Mastering Regular Expressions Review Date: 2 Dec, 2003

Overview
While many would agree that O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions is the definitive work on the topic, it can be a little heady to wade through when you're just trying to remember that one metacharacter sequence to perfect the regex you're crafting. The Regular Expression Pocket Reference offers itself as quick-reference companion to MRE, providing concise information on regular expression usage for several programming languages, libraries, and tools.

What's in it?
The book begins with a brief introduction to regular expressions, covering various aspects of their use, the engines that power them, and the various pieces you can use to build them. The remainder of the book is broken into sections each covering regular expression usage for a particular language, library, or utility. Sections included are:

• Perl 5.8
• Java (java.util.regex)
• .Net and C#
• Python
• PCRE Lib
• PHP
• vi editor
• JavaScript
• awk,sed, and egrep

Each of these sections follows a similar format. First are several tables outlining the various metacharacters available in the regular expression support for the library, language, or utility. Following is brief coverage of the functions or language features provided to utilize regular expressions, and then a few words about Unicode support in each tool. Finally each section provides a few examples of usage. Similar examples are found in each section, which makes for helpful comparisons when moving from one language or tool to another. Closing up the book is an index (rare for pocket references) which is always nice.

Who will want to buy it?
If you're new to using regular expressions, I'd recommend starting out with something more meaty to provide a thorough background to regular expressions, such as the aforementioned Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl. Once you've got your head better wrapped around regular expressions, this pocket reference will be helpful when you're trying to remember the difference between (?:...), (?=...), and (?!...), or when you can't recall whether the java.util.regex library supports the \< metacharacter sequence. Throughout the book are references to sections in MRE, so you can easily find where to turn to there to learn more about a particular topic mentioned. Those who use regular expressions in several languages or tools, and need to quickly be able to see which features are supported in which tools will likely benefit the most from this work.

Summary
Overall, I was eager to get my hands on this pocket reference, and while helpful, it is a bit terse. A little more meat couldn't have hurt.

Overall Rating: 7/10