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Chapter 5: References and Further Reading

  1. “Mastering Regular Expressions” by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
    Covers both basic and advanced topics, and is widely regarded as the definitive reference for anyone serious about learning regex.

  2. “Regular Expressions Cookbook” by Jan Goyvaerts and Steven Levithan
    Practical solutions and examples for a range of regex problems. It suits beginners as well as experienced users who want to improve their regex skills.

  3. “Introducing Regular Expressions” by Michael Fitzgerald
    A beginner-friendly book that explains the concepts and uses of regular expressions clearly.

Online resources

  1. Regex101
    An online regex tester and debugger that supports PCRE (PHP, JavaScript, Python), ECMAScript (JavaScript), and Python flavors. It’s a good place to learn and experiment with regular expressions.

  2. Regular-Expressions.info
    A detailed site for learning regular expressions. It goes from the basics to advanced topics and compares regex features across programming languages.

  3. Regexr
    An interactive tool for learning, testing, and debugging regular expressions. It’s easy to use and shows visually how a pattern matches.

  4. Regex Crossword
    Puzzles that turn regex practice into a game. They’re fun, and the harder ones will stretch your skills.

Articles and tutorials

  1. “Understanding Regular Expressions” by Peter Norvig
    Explains how regular expressions work under the hood, including their performance characteristics and common pitfalls.

  2. “Regular Expressions: Now You Have Two Problems” by Jeff Atwood
    A humorous blog post about the complexities of regular expressions and when and why to use them.

  3. “Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast” by Russ Cox
    Shows why backtracking regex engines, like the ones in Perl, Python, and Java, can take exponentially long on some patterns, and how engines based on finite automata avoid the problem.

Community and forums

  1. Stack Overflow
    A popular forum where you can ask questions about regular expressions and find answers. The regex tag already has solutions to many common regex problems.

  2. Reddit - r/regex
    A community for regex enthusiasts, with discussions, tips, and challenges.

  3. GitHub Repositories
    Search GitHub for open-source projects related to regular expressions to see how regex is used in real applications.

Further reading

  1. “Programming Pearls” by Jon Bentley
    Not entirely about regular expressions, but this classic has several chapters on efficient string manipulation, including the use of regex.

  2. “The Pragmatic Programmer” by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
    Includes tips and tricks for regular expressions, mostly in the context of everyday programming tasks.

  3. “Beautiful Code” by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson
    A collection of essays, several of which show how regular expressions can solve complex problems elegantly.