How to Read This Book

This book is part tutorial, part reference manual, and part story, depending on when you use it. Readers familiar with regular expressions might feel that they can immediately begin using this book as a detailed reference, flipping directly to the section on their favorite utility. I would like to discourage that.

To get the most out of this book, read the first six chapters as a story. I have found that certain habits and ways of thinking can be a great help to reaching a full understanding, but such things are absorbed over pages, not merely memorized from a list.

This book tells a story, but one with many details. Once you've read the story to get the overall picture, this book is also useful as a reference. The last three chapters (covering specifics of Perl, Java, and .NET) rely heavily on your having read the first six chapters. To help you get the most from each part, I've used cross references liberally, and I've worked hard to make the index as useful as possible. (Cross references are often presented as links.)

Until you read the full story, this book's use as a reference makes little sense. Before reading the story, you might look at one of the tables, such as the chart in Section 3.1.2, and think it presents all the relevant information you need to know. But a great deal of background information does not appear in the charts themselves, but rather in the associated story. Once you've read the story, you'll have an appreciation for the issues, what you can remember off the top of your head, and what is important to check up on.