Review by Billy Barron

"Mastering Regular Expressions" by Friedl (O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN 1-56592-257-3) is a book that I wish had came out years ago when I really needed it. The book is excellent. The real gem of the book is that it tackles the most commonly occuring difficult regular expression parsing problem, which is parsing RFC 822 e-mail addresses. That section alone is worth the price of the book!

I know this is a short review, but this is such a good book that I don't have much to say. If you are using UNIX, Perl or parsing text frequently, you will almost certainly find this book useful.