Just a quick post to note that Regular Expressions Cookbook by Jan Goyvaerts and me (published by O'Reilly Media) is available for pre-order on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and many other places. It was mostly completed at the end of January, and is coming out May 15 June 4.
Regular Expressions Cookbook contains a full regex tutorial (presented in cookbook format) and over 100 additional regular expression recipes that are explained in depth and work with C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, VB.NET, and more. Get it while it's hot!
And yes, that's a rat musk shrew (or more specifically, greater white-toothed shrew) on the cover.
Great work, Steven! I will be pre-ordering mine today. How/why did they choose a rat? My O’Reilly Python book also has a rat on the cover.
Thanks, Christoph! Learning Python, which I suppose you’re talking about (several other O’Reilly Python books have rodents on their covers), has a wood rat on the cover according to the O’Reilly Animal Menagerie. O’Reilly folks didn’t explain why they chose a rat for the cover of Regular Expressions Cookbook, but they gave Jan and me the opportunity to express concern in case we hated rats. 🙂
Dude, as I mentioned earlier that cover is epic FAIL. I even gave you the perfect alternative. Your book’s still going to move units but it could’ve been so much more…
Why, that’s none other than Regex the Rat! Hero of the common man, friend of the downtrodden, and foe of all evil irregular expressions! Go, Regex, go!
I am so excited to be among the first to get this book. So, finally, all those Starbucks hours, and caffeine jitters will pay off! 😉
when’s the next book coming?
Very proud of you brother, keep it up, We Miss you.
Steve! I’d like to be able to read your blog, but I can’t. Me no understandy this mumbo jumbo. Saaad. Cool that you’re in Iraq though. I was there.
@Sunny James, reeally? That’s cool… when and why were you there?
Looking forward to reading the book, seems interesting, here’s hoping this is just the first in a series of regex books you author. And the cover animal could have been worse, “Programming Embedded Systems in C and C++” has ticks on its cover.
About the animals:
http://oreilly.com/animals.html
@ddrudik, thanks!
The book has been finalized, printed, and is available now, although Amazon still lists June 4 as the release date.
So why shall I buy this book when there is the perfect and very detailed book “Mastering regular Expressions” by Jeffrey Friedl?
@Mati, for the shrew. Yes, it’s that cute. But seriously, the two books serve different purposes. I’m a big fan of Friedl’s book, too. Have a look at the reviews on Amazon and elsewhere and see if this might be up your alley.