Customer Reviews
I was looking for something better.
If all I had wanted was an introduction to Regular Expressions in .NET, this book would have been fine, I guess. However, I had already learned quite a bit from Microsoft's documentation, and was hoping for a clear elucidation of a few points that MS had glossed over, to wit, how to use balancing expressions and alternating constructs, and also how to do some tricky things such as finding everything that doesn't match a given pattern, etc. Appleman indeed addresses the balancing expressions and alternating constructs in greater depth than the MS documentation, but his treatise is somewhat inadequate. He gives one elaborate example which uses both constructions, but fails to explain how to generalize from his example; and the regex pattern in his example itself, which is supposed to return the contents of successively nested parentheses, is not a general solution at all, but only works on a fairly narrow set of test cases. I think this stems from him having a less-than-profound understanding of regular expressions himself: he all but admits that he simply banged his head against the wall of Microsoft's documentation until he figured stuff out. Can't blame him for trying; this stuff is some of the most abstruse and dreadful stuff I've ever seen, in thirty years of professional programming. I just wish I could find something a bit more comprehensive (and comprehensible) from somebody who REALLY knows what the underlying interpreter/compiler does. All the better stuff that I've seen out there is unaware of the particulars of the .Net environment. Bottom line: since you can't get a refund on the e-book, save your money and re-read the Microsoft Stuff a few more times.
Regular Expressions are a Must
Once you become serious about .NET, you'll find Regular Expressions staring you square in the face. They're there and they are very important, but the .NET documentation doesn't help much in learning about Regular Expressions and how to work with them in .NET.
That's where Dan Appleman's Ebook comes in. I think that Dan has done an absolutley stupendous job in the following 3 areas:
a) Dan explains the essence of Regular Expressions from a general perspective. After all, "Regular Expressions" is a language unto itself, even without .NET. This Ebook gives you a good intuitive feel of how pattern matching is expressed with the "Regular Expressions" language.
b) The Ebook shines in its explanation of .NET's take on Regular Expressions. This book thoroughly explores the various classes and methods that .NET offers for working with Regular Expressions. Dan does a great job teaching you about Groups and Captures.
c) The code download for the book is top-notch. Clearly, there was a lot of thought put into providing meaningful examples to help the reader internalize the .NET approach to processing with
Regular Expression.
I think the Ebook format is perfect for this topic.
I have one criticism, though. I believe that the advertising glop at the end of the end of the Ebook is somewhat extraneous.
A link to this material should have been sufficient.
Somewhat disappointing
I'm a bit disappointed in this book. I find regular expressions to be a challenging subject, and I was looking for a clear tutorial that would start with the basics and work its way up to more complex expressions. On that basis, I bought this book.
The book's explanation of the basics are a bit thin for my tastes. For example, it jumps into groups and backreferencing on page 11, while I'm still struggling with more basic concepts. If you already 'get' regular expressions, this book is probably a good text. However, if you are struggling with the fundamentals, as I am, you may view its explanation as being weak.
