Tag: contest

‘Regular Expressions Cookbook’ Giveaway on Jan Goyvaerts’s Regex Guru

If you're not already a subscriber, check out Regex Guru, an excellent blog on all things regex by Jan Goyvaerts (coauthor of Regular Expressions Cookbook and creator of regular-expressions.info, RegexBuddy, PowerGREP, and RegexMagic). Now's a better time than ever to check out the site since he's giving away five copies of Regular Expressions Cookbook; just leave a comment on this post (but make sure to read the rules listed there first) by Feb. 28th and you're in the running.

Note that Jan's contest is separate from my ongoing giveaway to promote the release of High Performance JavaScript (ends Feb. 24th). You can be entered in both contests at the same time.

‘High Performance JavaScript’ Giveaway Now Five Books

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

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!

Regex Day Contest

A few months ago Ben Nadel (a regex fan and prominent ColdFusion blogger) asked me if I was interested in promoting his idea for a "National Regular Expression Day," where he'd give away some shirts and books and basically just have some fun with regex evangelism. Well, Ben finally kicked if off, assigning the honor to June 1st, 2008. Make sure to check out his blog post, because by simply posting a comment noting your preferred item from his list before June 2nd, you're entered to win it.

I'm all for regex evangelism, so I figured I'd get in on the action with my own regex contest where you can win the best commercial regex products I know of, worth up to $150! The rules are a little different here though. For one thing, you've got more time to enter — I'll keep this open until the end of Friday, June 13. Second, this isn't a lottery. The rules are still pretty simple, though.

  • Write (or link to) some kind of creative regex content in a comment on this blog post.
  • It has to be something new, specifically for this contest.
  • Enter by unlucky Friday, June 13.
  • When submitting your entry, make sure to include an email address where I can reach you in the email field (it won't be visible to others, and I'll only use it to contact you about this contest).
  • You can submit multiple entries, but each will be judged on its own and one person cannot win more than one award.
  • I get to be the judge and jury.

As for what kind of content is eligible, well, pretty much anything as long as it's regex related. You can write a regex joke (preferably not ending with the punchline "now they have two problems"), post a regex article somewhere, create a regex comic strip, share your favorite regex you've written, design a regex superhero, create a regex game, tell a story about how regexes saved the day, link to a blog post you've written about Regular Expression Day, or whatever you can come up with. Go nuts.

Here's what the winners can choose from. If you win first or second place but none of the prizes in that tier interest you, you can pick two items from a lower level.

Good luck, and I hope you have fun with this. smile (Once again, make sure to check out Ben's post that started this.)