I've been using regular expressions (knowingly / intentionally) for the better part of the last 2 decades, and yet until I read this book, I didn't fully realise what a powerful set of tools I had at my disposal. Jeffrey Friedl's explanation of what makes the various types of engines work, and the chapter on optimising regexes for NFAs were extremely helpful. As a network security administrator I find myself having to parse through massive amounts of text and data a regular basis, and thanks to this book, I've been able to better automate a lot these processes and gleam more valuable data from the waves of information waiting to be processed. This book really should be essential reading not just for programmers and web developers, but any one who works in IT or might benefit from the use any kind of scripting / automation.

Mastering regular expressions: powerful techniques for Perl and other tools PDF

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