Practice Makes Regexp

ARE YOU SPENDING TOO MUCH TIME FIDDLING WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS?

Regular expressions are incredibly useful: They let you search through huge quantities of text, extracting only the things that are useful to you.

For decades, programmers have used regular expressions to examine logfiles, retrieve portions of user input, and replace text that follows complex rules.

Indeed, in many cases, regexps can be a real life saver.

Need to figure out if certain types of private information are in your logfiles? Or handle input from poorly written APIs, whose contents vary from release to release? Or find out which disks are close to filling up?

These are the sorts of problems that regexps can solve quickly, easily, and elegantly.

SO WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE ABOUT REGULAR EXPRESSIONS?

Have you ever known a developer who needed to use a regexp to solve a crucial, time-boxed problem, at work?

They know that you can get it…if they just add parentheses here. Or a plus sign there. Or a question mark at the end. Or something.

They spend hours fiddling—trying to figure out the proper syntax and searching online and plugging in snippets that may or may not work.

It’s a tedious and time consuming system, and even worse, guarantees that their regexp won’t quite do what they want…

No wonder so many people give up before they master regular expressions!

HOW DO YOU GET BACK YOUR CODING TIME?

Some developers try to learn regexps via books and websites. But most of those resources just throw some syntax at you, and tell you that you’ll be set.

I know from experience that this system doesn’t work (both from when I started to program, to more than a decade of teaching regexps at major high-tech companies around the world).

Just as reading a single grammar book won’t teach students a foreign language, developers can’t learn regular expressions from memorizing the syntax alone.

So, how do developers master regexps? They treat it as a language—and then practice, practice, practice.

There’s no substitute for practice when it comes to regular expressions.

Moreover, once you do practice them, you start to internalize their structure and power. And then you start to see more and more places in which regexps can solve problems, more quickly than you ever imagined.

You can get your own work done faster because you have the right tools to attack the problem, and you line yourself up for good things, like promotions and tackling that side project application you always dreamed of creating.

SO, ARE YOU READY TO START PRACTICING & GET YOUR CODING TIME BACK?

Practice Makes Regexp doesn’t aim to teach developers regular expressions.There are other books and resources for that.

Rather, this course aims to take a fledgling knowledge of regexps, and make regexps fluent and natural!

Here’s what you get:

  • 50 regexp exercises, solutions, and explanations…
  • all in a 175 page ebook…
  • in PDF, ePub and .mobi formats
  • With additional solutions for Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL

Plus, for higher packages…

  • Data files for each exercise
  • Separate solution files in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL, organized by chapter and language
  • 300 slides from a 2-day regexp course
  • Most impressively: The best five hours of regular expressions screencasts you’ll find online!

This course’s primary goal is to help developers master regexps, so that they can use them in their work with speed and confidence.

Each exercise in Practice Makes Regexp has solutions in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL (except for the chapter on the Unix shell, in which solutions are presented for the “grep” command).

No matter which of these languages you use, this course will help you to do your work faster and better, working fluidly with text and extracting precisely what you need.

If you have been struggling to use regular expressions in your work, then I believe Practice Makes Regexp is the course that you’ve been waiting for.