Intended Audience

This book will interest anyone who has an opportunity to use regular expressions. If you don't yet understand the power that regular expressions can provide, you should benefit greatly as a whole new world is opened up to you. This book should expand your understanding, even if you consider yourself an accomplished regular-expression expert. After the first edition, it wasn't uncommon for me to receive an email that started "I thought I knew regular expressions until I read Mastering Regular Expressions. Now I do."

Programmers working on text-related tasks, such as web programming, will find an absolute gold mine of detail, hints, tips, and understanding that can be put to immediate use. The detail and thoroughness is simply not found anywhere else.

Regular expressions are an idea—one that is implemented in various ways by various utilities (many, many more than are specifically presented in this book). If you master the general concept of regular expressions, it's a short step to mastering a particular implementation. This book concentrates on that idea, so most of the knowledge presented here transcends the utilities and languages used to present the examples.