Category: Project Releases

Five Free Copies of Upcoming O’Reilly Book ‘High Performance JavaScript’

Update (2010-02-25): This contest is now closed.

Book cover: High Performance JavaScript

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 by February 24th, and I'll pick five people to send a copy to as soon as it's released (Amazon says March 15th). 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!

Edit (2010-02-09): Nicholas Zakas posted more information about High Performance JavaScript on his blog: Announcing High Performance JavaScript.

Edit (2010-02-25): This contest is now closed. Winners will be announced here shortly.

Edit (2010-03-03): Following are the winners of this giveaway (the first four were chosen randomly):

  1. David Henderson
  2. Daniel Trebbien
  3. Lea Verou
  4. Stefan "schnalle" Schallerl
  5. Adam Crabtree

No. 5 Adam Crabtree, who wants to review the book and share it with members of the DallasJS Meetup Group, wins the nonrandom drawing for the best reason to win a copy. Runners up for this selection were Yoav, who promised to donate the book to a high school library after he's done with it; Nick Carter, who threatened me with his wrath if he doesn't win (I'll have to endure); Paul Irish, who kindly offered to have my last name corrected (to that of a sea monster) in exchange for winning; Alexei, a technical editor of a couple of Nicholas Zakas's previous books who'd like to know how many errors this one contains; and Marcel Korpel, who wants to improve his users' health by reducing the "headaches, general stress and insomnia" they suffer while waiting on his websites. 🙂

The winners have been informed by email about how to collect their prize. Thanks to everyone for playing!

XRegExp 1.0

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):

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).

Regular Expressions Cookbook is Out

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.

XRegExp 0.5 Released!

Update: This version of XRegExp is outdated. See XRegExp.com for the latest, greatest version.

If you haven't seen the prior versions, XRegExp is an MIT-licensed JavaScript library that provides an augmented, cross-browser implementation of regular expressions, including support for additional modifiers and syntax. Several convenience methods and a new, powerful recursive-construct parser that uses regex delimiters are also included.

Here's what you get beyond the standard JavaScript regex features:

  • Added regex syntax:
    • Comprehensive named capture support. (Improved)
    • Comment patterns: (?#…). (New)
  • Added regex modifiers (flags):
    • s (singleline), to make dot match all characters including newlines.
    • x (extended), for free-spacing and comments.
  • Added awesome:
    • Reduced cross-browser inconsistencies. (More)
    • Recursive-construct parser with regex delimiters. (New)
    • An easy way to cache and reuse regex objects. (New)
    • The ability to safely embed literal text in your regex patterns. (New)
    • A method to add modifiers to existing regex objects.
    • Regex call and apply methods, which make generically working with functions and regexes easier. (New)

All of this can be yours for the low, low price of 2.4 KB. smile Version 0.5 also introduces extensive documentation and code examples.

If you're using a previous version, note that there are a few non-backward compatible changes for the sake of strict ECMA-262 Edition 3 compliance and compatibility with upcoming ECMAScript 4 changes.

  • The XRegExp.overrideNative function has been removed, since it is no longer possible to override native constructors in Firefox 3 or ECMAScript 4 (as proposed).
  • Named capture syntax has been changed from (<name>…) to (?<name>…), which is the standard in most regex libraries and under consideration for ES4. Named capture is now always available, and does not require the k modifier.
  • Due to cross-browser compatibility issues, previous versions enforced that a leading, unescaped ] within a character class was treated as a literal character, which is how things work in most regex flavors. XRegExp now follows ECMA-262 Edition 3 on this point. [] is an empty set and never matches (this is enforced in all browsers).

Get it while it's hot! Check out the new XRegExp documentation and source code.

Date Format 1.1

I've just updated my ColdFusion-inspired JavaScript Date Format script to version 1.0 1.1, and updated the documentation in the old post along with it. The new release includes "Z" (US timezone abbreviation) and "o" (UTC offset) flags as well as brevity enhancements from Scott Trenda, along with several other new features including a standalone dateFormat function, named and default masks (plus you can easily add your own), easier internationalization, etc.

This update includes one change which is not backwards compatible: mask characters and sequences no longer have to comprise entire words for them to be treated specially. The former handling was intended to make it dead-easy to mix literal characters into date masks, but ended up mostly just being a slight nuisance since most people didn't use it to embed dates in larger strings.

Check out the new Date Format!

Edit: Date Format is now integrated into two JavaScript frameworks:

  • CFJS is a library of almost 70 ColdFusion functions written in JavaScript by Chris Jordan. CFJS has used Date Format, which was a natural fit since it's largely based on ColdFusion's dateFormat and timeFormat functions, since version 0.1.
  • Chiron is an innovative, emerging JavaScript library by Kris Kowal. It's based on Python idioms, and at its heart is an advanced module loader and isolation system the likes of which hasn't been seen yet in the JavaScript world. In addition to integrating Date Format as a module called date.js, Chiron has also integrated my XRegExp library, and uses regular expressions from parseUri in its core. Expect to hear more about Chiron as it gets closer to 0.1 release.