Have you ever known a developer who needed to use a regexp to solve a crucial, time-boxed problem, at work? They know that you can get it…if they just add parentheses here. Or a plus sign there. Or a question mark at the end. Or something.

They spend hours fiddling—trying to figure out the proper syntax and searching online and plugging in snippets that may or may not work.

It’s a tedious and time consuming system, and even worse, guarantees that their regexp won’t quite do what they want. No wonder so many people give up before they master regular expressions!

Some developers try to learn regexps via books and websites. But most of those resources just throw some syntax at you, and tell you that you’ll be set. I know from experience that this system doesn’t work (both from when I started to program, to more than a decade of teaching regexps at major high-tech companies around the world). Just as reading a single grammar book won’t teach students a foreign language, developers can’t learn regular expressions from memorizing the syntax alone.

So, how do developers master regexps? They treat it as a language—and then practice, practice, practice.

Once you do practice them, you start to internalize their structure and power. And then you start to see more and more places in which regexps can solve problems, more quickly than you ever imagined.

You can get your own work done faster because you have the right tools to attack the problem, and you line yourself up for good things, like promotions and tackling that side project application you always dreamed of creating.

Practice Makes Regexp doesn’t aim to teach developers regular expressions.There are other books and resources for that.

Here’s what you get:

Each exercise in Practice Makes Regexp has solutions in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL (except for the chapter on the Unix shell, in which solutions are presented for the “grep” command).  No matter which of these languages you use, this course will help you to do your work faster and better, working fluidly with text and extracting precisely what you need. If you have been struggling to use regular expressions in your work, then I believe Practice Makes Regexp is the course that you’ve been waiting for.

Not sure if the book is for you? Or do you need a refresher course in regular expressions?  You can sign up for my "regular expressions crash course," at http://regexpcrashcourse.com/ .