Going all the way back to 1951, mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene came up with the idea of regular expressions using his mathematical notation called regular events. At the basic level, a regular expression is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern. For example, if you have a folder that has many files but you would wish to list the ones that end with text extension, you will take advantage of regular expression characters to achieve that quite easily.
It is because of Regular Expressions that in your IDE, word processor and in other things like search engines, you can easily search for a word, a sentence or a letter without stressing. There are other complex applications of regular expressions that the resources we intend to share here will expose you to. Therein, we hope that your regular expression problems will be laid to rest and you are given the liberty to shine. The books you can look at include the following.
1. Mastering Regular Expressions
Author Jeffrey Friedl began using Unix (and regular expressions) in 1980, and earned degrees in Computer Science from Kent (BS) and the University of New Hampshire (MS). He did kernel development for Omron Corporation in Kyoto, Japan for eight years before moving in 1997 to Silicon Valley to apply his regular-expression know-how to financial news and data for a little-known company called “Yahoo!”.
If you do not use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you will appreciate Jeffrey’s unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regular expressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener.
As this book shows, a command of regular expressions is an invaluable skill. Regular expressions allow you to code complex and subtle text processing that you never imagined could be automated. Regular expressions can save you time and aggravation. They can be used to craft elegant solutions to a wide range of problems. Once you’ve mastered regular expressions, they’ll become an invaluable part of your toolkit. You will wonder how you ever got by without them.
Yet despite their wide availability, flexibility, and unparalleled power, regular expressions are frequently underutilized. Mastering Regular Expressions will help you navigate the minefield to becoming an expert and help you optimize your use of regular expressions.
The book presents the following topics:
- A comparison of features among different versions of many languages and tools
- How the regular expression engine works
- Optimization (major savings available here!)
- Matching just what you want, but not what you do not want
- Sections and chapters on individual languages
Jeffrey has done a beautiful job in this text. His rendition and what he has shared is as it has been mentioned a stunning eye-opener. Check out more about this resource from Amazon below and make sure a copy goes back home with you and enjoy this world of regex that is full of expressions.
2. Regular Expression Pocket Reference
Author Tony Stubblebine is an Internet consultant, entrepreneur, and blogger. He’s also the author of Regular Expression Pocket Reference, former Engineering Director for Odeo.com and former Engineering Lead for O’Reilly Media.
In this handy little book, Tony offers programmers a complete overview of the syntax and semantics of regular expressions that are at the heart of every text-processing application. Ideal as a quick reference, Regular Expression Pocket Reference covers the regular expression APIs for multiple programming languages like Java, PHP, .NET and C#, Python, vi and others.
This reference offers an introduction to regular expressions, pattern matching, metacharacters, modes and constructs, and then provides separate sections for each of the language APIs, with complete regex listing.
A good reason to buy this book is that it comes with plenty of examples and other resources. It summarizes the complex rules for performing this critical text-processing function and presents this often-confusing topic in a friendly and well-organized format. Buy it from Amazon below.
3. Regular Expressions Cookbook
Take the guesswork out of using regular expressions. With more than 140 practical recipes, this cookbook provides everything you need to solve a wide range of real-world problems. Novices will learn basic skills and tools, and programmers and experienced users will find a wealth of detail. Each recipe provides samples you can use right away.
This revised edition covers the regular expression flavours used by C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET. You will learn powerful new tricks, avoid flavour-specific gotchas, and save valuable time with this huge library of practical solutions.
What you will get out of this Cookbook
- Learn regular expressions basics through a detailed tutorial
- Use code listings to implement regular expressions with your language of choice
- Understand how regular expressions differ from language to language
- Handle common user input with recipes for validation and formatting
- Find and manipulate words, special characters, and lines of text
- Detect integers, floating-point numbers, and other numerical formats
- Parse source code and process log files
- Use regular expressions in URLs, paths, and IP addresses
- Manipulate HTML, XML, and data exchange formats
- Discover little-known regular expression tricks and techniques
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 flavours, and PowerGREP, the most feature-rich grep tool for Microsoft Windows.
Steve Levithan, a co-author, works at Facebook as a JavaScript engineer. He has enjoyed programming for nearly 15 years, working in Tokyo, Washington D.C., Baghdad, and Silicon Valley. Steven is a leading JavaScript regular expression expert and has created a variety of open-source regular expression tools including RegexPal and the XRegExp library.
As you can witness, the authors of this text have whatever it takes for you to grasp a handful of skills, advice and mind-blowing techniques that will definitely light up your career. Get into the authors’ minds and run away with the wealth of experience they have poured into the resource. Click below to get your hands on this cookbook from Amazon.
4. Learning Regular Expressions
Ben Forta is Adobe Systems’ Senior Director of Education Initiatives. He is also the author of numerous books on SQL, regular expressions, ColdFusion, Windows development, JSP, and more.
Ben Forta’s Learning Regular Expressions teaches you the regular expressions that you really need to know, starting with simple text matches and working up to more complex topics, including the use of backreferences, conditional evaluation, and look-ahead processing. You will learn what you can use, and you’ll learn it methodically, systematically, and simply.
What you will learn
- Read and understand regular expressions
- Use literal text and metacharacters to build powerful search patterns
- Take advantage of advanced regular expression features, including lookahead and backreferences
- Perform powerful search-and-replace operations in all major professional editing tools
- Add sophisticated form and text processing to web applications
- Search for files using command-line tools like grep and egrep
- Use regular expressions in programming languages like JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Microsoft .NET, and C#, as well as in DBMSs including MySQL and Oracle
- Work with phone numbers, postal codes, social security numbers, IP addresses, URLs, email addresses, and credit card numbers
Learning regular expressions makes regular expressions approachable for a wider audience because of the easy writing style. Readers are able to start reading and modifying regex after a couple of weeks with the content in it. Be the next start by giving this down-to-earth material a shot. Click below, get to Amazon and have yourself a copy.
5. Introducing Regular Expressions
Author Michael Fitzgerald describes Ruby as his “favourite language so far” and is working regularly with Ruby and the Rails framework. He has written over 150 Ruby programs for testing and demonstration and has been developing a library of sample Ruby code.
If you are a programmer new to regular expressions, this easy-to-follow guide by Michael is a great place to start. You’ll learn the fundamentals step-by-step with the help of numerous examples, discovering first-hand how to match, extract, and transform text by matching specific words, characters, and patterns.
When you have finished this book, you will be familiar with the most commonly used syntax in regular expressions, and you will understand how using them will save you considerable time.
What you will encounter
- Discover what regular expressions are and how they work
- Learn many of the differences between regular expressions used with command-line tools and in various programming languages
- Apply simple methods for finding patterns in text, including digits, letters, Unicode characters, and string literals
- Learn how to use zero-width assertions and lookarounds
- Work with groups, backreferences, character classes, and quantifiers
- Use regular expressions to mark up plain text with HTML5
Michael knows it well. Be clear and succinct. He compressed this book into a small piece, but takes the beginner through all the basic parts of a regex, up through lookaheads and looks behind. You will enjoy the journey. To begin it though, you need to have its pages as the ticket and you can do that by vising Amazon and getting a copy. Accomplish it all by clicking on the link provided below.
6. Mastering Python Regular Expressions
Mastering Python Regular Expressions will teach you about Regular Expressions, starting from the basics, irrespective of the language being used, and then it will show you how to use them in Python. You will learn the finer details of what Python supports and how to do it and the differences between Python 2.x and Python 3.x.
The book starts with a general review of the theory behind the regular expressions followed by an overview of the Python regex module implementation and then moves on to advanced topics like grouping, looking around, and performance.
You will explore how to leverage Regular Expressions in Python, some advanced aspects of Regular Expressions and also how to measure and improve their performance. You will get a better understanding of the working of alternators and quantifiers.
What You Will Learn
- Explore the regular expressions syntax
- Improve the readability and future maintenance of the regex
- Find solutions for typical problems with regular expressions
- Familiarize yourself with match and search operations
- Leverage the look-around technique to create powerful regular expressions
- Gain insight into the uses of Groups
- Get to know how the regex engine works through the Backtracking process
- Enhance the performance of your regular expressions
Having a resource with the promise of making you a master in a given field is as invaluable as the skill itself. The instruction, the exercises and advice being shared in the book will make all the difference without you knowing it. Let the resource be delivered to you from Amazon.
7. Simplifying Regular Expression Using Python
This book authored by Mr. Abhishek Singh and Mr. Zohaib Hasan has been awarded as one of the best books for regular expressions in 2020 and 2021 by bookauthority.org.
This guide targets beginners by providing elementary knowledge of Python language. Normally, regular expressions are not covered in the syllabus in most guides and are considered a tough topic.
This guide is entirely dedicated to Regular Expressions, providing in-depth coverage with innumerable examples that include password validation, string manipulations, email ID validation and more. Each example is carefully analyzed step by step, making it easy to understand and even feel like coding just by reading the code. The book is written to provide a stress-free, comfortable and enjoyable learning experience.
You can get a copy of this book using the link below:
8. Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes
Regular Expressions also known as RegEx, are widely supported in all major development environments, making them appealing to anyone using these tools for editing and working with code. Moreover, all JavaScript developers should utilize RegEx, but unfortunately, many have not been taught it well. Developers working with C#, ASP, ColdFusion, PHP, Perl, Java JSP, Python, and other languages can (and should) also make use of RegEx, which makes them potential readers of this book.
By reading this book, you will learn how to:
- Match repeating characters (using minimums and maximums if needed)
- Match character sets
- Build sub-expressions
- Match (or ignore) based on the case
- Use POSIX classes to simplify complex expressions
- Work with escape sequences
- Use all of the special characters
- Use look-behind operators
- Use back-references
Get a copy of the guide:
9. Practical Usage of Regular Expressions
This guide aims to provide a practical usage of regular expressions by showing real use cases from simple regexes tasks such as intelligent searches, quality assurance (consistency), automating conversions etc.
Even though this book focuses on a translation tool environment, the fundamental language elements and examples described are applicable to Microsoft® .NET®-based environments and, in fact, to most regex engines as well. This book excels at explaining even complex constructs in a clear manner, using schematic diagrams and relevant examples. With its organized structure, abundant illustrative examples, helpful regexes, and syntax summary, it serves as the best reference material.
The detailed examples used in this book offer beginners a painless introduction to regexes, explaining all necessary concepts except for the most advanced applications. Despite its conciseness, the book serves as detailed reference material for all regex users, not just translators, but also for general applications. It covers CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tools and also discusses general editors that provide regex support, such as Microsoft® Word® with its wildcards feature.
Unlike most books that offer general and generic examples, this book goes beyond by providing over 100 practical examples with detailed explanations. These examples are specifically tailored for typical translator tasks, enhancing the overall text content.
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10. Beginning Regular Expressions
This can serve as a beginner guide to regular expressions, it nicely introduces you to the different components of a regular expression pattern, offering clear explanations of their meanings. Working examples, guide you step-by-step, demonstrating how they function and the reasons behind their behaviour. As you progress through the examples provided, you develop a strong grasp of how to effectively manipulate regular expressions to achieve your desired outcomes. This hands-on approach will help you avoid creating regular expressions that do not align with your intentions.
In the initial chapters, you’ll be introduced to regular expressions and learn a systematic approach for breaking down text manipulation problems into smaller components. This method empowers you to construct a well-suited regular expression pattern that precisely matches your intended criteria while avoiding matches with unwanted text.
In the second part of the book, individual chapters are dedicated to various technologies available on the Windows platform. Each chapter focuses on demonstrating how to effectively use regular expressions with specific tools or programming languages. For instance, you’ll learn how to perform a lookahead in Perl or create a named variable in C# using regular expressions.
To get a copy of this guide, follow the below link.
Concluding Remarks
Mastering regular expressions which we believe the books above will fix can save you thousands of hours if you work with text or need to parse large amounts of data. Whether you are a programmer, a data scientist, a systems administrator or anyone who would wish to do powerful search, replacement, extraction and validation of strings, repetitive and complex tasks, simple pattern using regular expressions is the panacea.
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