Flagrant Badassery

Laurel Ackerman, Director of Marketing for O'Reilly Media, was kind enough to offer to pick up the tab for my ongoing book giveaway and increase the booty to five books! If you haven't entered the contest yet (which ends February 24^th), now's your chance because your odds of winning have just gone up.

My blog has seen a lot of downtime over the last couple days; many people have reported seeing the message "Internal Server Error." I was in contact with my hosting provider from the beginning, and after several issues were fixed without the main problem going away, I moved this blog to a different server. Hopefully that's the end of the trouble. For those of you who've been unable to enter the book giveaway for O'Reilly's High Performance JavaScript and Regular Expressions Cookbook, I apologize for all the hassle. Please try again!

Last year, Yahoo! engineer and all-around JavaScript badass Nicholas Zakas asked if I was interested in writing a chapter for a new book on JavaScript performance that he was working on. I agreed, and that book, High Performance JavaScript, is now available for preorder at Amazon and other fine book retailers.

In addition to the wide-ranging content by Nicholas and a chapter on string and regular expression performance by yours truly, chapters were also contributed by an awesome lineup of JavaScript performance gurus: Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Stoyan Stefanov, and Matt Sweeney. This book is unique in its laser-focus on optimizing the performance of your JavaScript applications, and covers many advanced topics in the process. The chapter on strings and regular expressions provides what I think is easily the most in-depth coverage of cross-browser JavaScript regex performance currently available.

Here's the list of chapters:

1. Loading and Execution
2. Data Access
3. DOM Scripting (Stoyan Stefanov)
4. Algorithms and Flow Control
5. Strings and Regular Expressions (Steven Levithan)
6. Responsive Interfaces
7. Ajax (Ross Harmes)
8. Programming Practices
9. Build and Deployment (Julien Lecomte)
10. Tools (Matt Sweeney)

To celebrate the completion of this book, I'm giving away three copies. O'Reilly Media increased the offer to five books! All you need to do is comment on this post, and on February 24^th, I'll pick five people to send a copy to as soon as it's released (Amazon says March 15^th). If you prefer, I'd be happy to send you a copy of Regular Expressions Cookbook instead (please note which book you want in your comment). Four winners will be chosen at random from the pool of unique commenters (I'll be tracking IPs), and the fifth based on the reason given for why you want a copy.

Make sure to include your email address in the comment form, since I'll need it to contact you if you're selected (your email address won't be used for any other purpose). Good luck, and congratulations to Nicholas Zakas and all the other authors on completing a fantastic new book!

Edit (2010-02-05): My blog has been offline more often than not for the first two days after posting this, and many people have reported that they were unable to post a comment. I apologize for the screw-up—my blog is now on a different server, and the problems should be resolved. Please try again!

Edit (2010-02-08): O'Reilly Media kindly offered to pick up the tab for this giveaway, and increased the winnings to five books!

After stalling for nearly a year, I've finally released XRegExp 1.0, the next generation of my JavaScript regular expression library. Although it doesn't add support for lookbehind (as I've previously suggested) due to what would amount to significant inherent limitations, it fixes a couple bugs, corrects even more cross-browser regex inconsistencies, and adds a suite of new regular expression functions and methods that make writing regex-intensive JavaScript applications easier than ever. One of these new functions, XRegExp.addToken, fundamentally changes XRegExp's implementation and allows you to easily create your own XRegExp plugins.

Here's XRegExp's abbreviated feature list from the brand new xregexp.com (which includes extensive documentation and code examples):

• Adds new regex and replacement text syntax, including comprehensive support for named capture.
• Adds two new regex flags: s, to make dot match all characters (aka singleline mode), and x, for free-spacing and comments (aka extended mode).
• Provides a suite of 12 functions and methods that make complex regex processing a breeze.
• Automagically fixes the most commonly encountered cross-browser inconsistencies in regex behavior and syntax.
• Lets you easily create and use plugins that add new syntax and flags to XRegExp's regular expression language.

The full list of changes can be seen in the changelog. Please let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions for the library. I'd also love to hear about projects or sites that are using XRegExp (I've got a few listed on the XRegExp homepage now).

As of today, Regular Expressions Cookbook (written by Jan Goyvaerts and me, and published by O'Reilly Media) is listed as In Stock on Amazon.com and other fine bookstores. The book covers seven regular expression flavors (.NET, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PCRE, Python, and Ruby) and eight programming languages (C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET). It's targeted at people with regex skills from beginner to upper intermediate, and there's a fair amount of information in there even for people who already consider themselves regex experts. For those who'd like to know more, Jan has a good summary on his blog, and here is O'Reilly's press release for the book.

Don't forget to pick up a copy of your very own.