Eh... Not so good.
This is a very wordy book for a topic that should probably have a more reference style coverage. It focuses a little bit on how to use the matching functions in .net, and a little bit on how to use regular expressions.
The .net stuff is really easy to get on your own, and the regular expressions stuff is so glossy that its not that useful.
I don't like having this book on my shelf since I can never find anything useful at a glance, but its not worth anything to sell. Maybe I'll burn it.
Excellent in covering the subject, could be a little more coherenet
This is a great book. Period. Regular Expressions is a chaotic subject to start, I couldn't find usefull help on MSDN. This book does a great job bridging the gap. I'm still a novice in Regular Expressions (it's too spagetti-ish for a business software developer), but this book helped me implement whatever lightweight logic I needed.
Then why 4 stars, you probably ask. Because I found it to be a little incoherent to pass the 5 star benchmark. The author is a little too all-over-the-place-ish. But it was well worth the money spent.
Note
This book was sold by Wrox to APress. The code download is available directly from APress at http://support.apress.com.
Great Reference
Unless you are writing games for a living, YOU WILL be spending a lot of time manipulating text. I have a true love/hate relationship with using regular expressions but there is no argument about the sheer power they bring to a developer's workbench. This guide is very concise and is a `must have' reference book. Well organized and written. I don't know what's happening with it's publication. I got it from Amazon from a re-seller and I'm not quite sure if it's still being printed. I know that when I went to download the sample code I was redirected to another site. Whatever it's status is, don't miss out and get your copy now. I don't know of another reference for the .NET developer for text/string/regular expressions.
Gary Chamberlain
Wow! Quite impressed! I have been programming in VB, C and Java for years. This book is a concise explanation of strings with great history for perspective and detail about .NET implementation. This book reads very well and has great code examples. I suppose someone that doesn't know anything about programming shouldn't be trying to read a book about string encoding and regular expressions in the first place. This is not an introductoryto VB.net book (thank god!)
If you are an intermediate or greater developer that is new to .NET then this book is a must read. I've seen so many VB developers hurt themselves with string concat in VB. This book explains why and how the .NET framework solves those problems.
Regular Expressions is such a powerful tool. It is a shame that it took so many years for it to become part of the Microsoft arsenal. It has been used in Perl for decades.
It behooves every programmer to learn about the following three topics...
1] The StringBuilder class
2] Interning Strings
3] Regular Expressions.
Also, in the past, I have not been a big fan of wrox books. ..not sure why. I think, comparatively, they were hard to read. Even when reading topics that I thouroughly knew, I found the wording and layout less than ideal. It was probably just a bad group of editors. (There are even a few mispellings and mistakes in this book) However, I am a big fan of this new layout. Smaller books covering specific topics that you want to learn is the way to go.
This book is great. Get it.
(8 reviews)
