The O'Reilly cookbooks are sort of like Stack Overflow: There's a problem, and you get a solution to that problem. Along the way, you might be lucky enough to learn something of how regexps work, and then apply that knowledge to future regexps.
The exercises in my book are designed to improve your mental model for regular expressions, and to increase your fluency. The exercises aren't likely to be practical problems that you'll have to solve. These are toy problems -- but each has been selected to tickle a different part of regexps that give people issues.
After you do the exercises in my book, and reading my solutions and explanations, you'll have a broad understanding of how to use regexps, and how to apply them to your own work. Your mental model will be clearer, and you'll be able to solve lots of problems -- not just those presented in a cookbook.
reuven|10 years ago
The exercises in my book are designed to improve your mental model for regular expressions, and to increase your fluency. The exercises aren't likely to be practical problems that you'll have to solve. These are toy problems -- but each has been selected to tickle a different part of regexps that give people issues.
After you do the exercises in my book, and reading my solutions and explanations, you'll have a broad understanding of how to use regexps, and how to apply them to your own work. Your mental model will be clearer, and you'll be able to solve lots of problems -- not just those presented in a cookbook.