Book Review: Mastering Regular Expressions

I just finished the Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions. My previous regexp education has been driven by the necessity to scan a log file or search or replace a snippet in a source tree -- that is, haphazard. Friedl's book really is worthy of its title and it should carry The Definitive Guide as its subtitle.

Friedl is a Regexp Master and reading this book is really an excellent way to improve your understanding of the theory, implementation, and application of regular expressions.

As a practical result of this book, I have noticed I am more confident in applying regexps in my text editors (UltraEdit and IntelliJ IDEA) for both search and replace -- particularly for "captured groups." This is useful for taking code and turning it into documentation that non-programmers can read.