I thoroughly enjoyed this. It may not be everyone's cup of tea; the subject matter is a bit esoteric. However, I write and maintain a fair amount of Perl, and matching and parsing patterns is often the largest part of the work. I'd guess that I have a medium grasp on the details of parsing regular expressions, but I'm very weak in the grammar area that this book also covers.

There's a lot of attention given to CPAN parsing modules. I tend to ignore CPAN more than I should; there's so much there, and so much of it is confusing and poorly documented that I sometimes feel that I'm just looking for trouble if I go looking for anything. It is therefore nice to have a book like this that introduces and explains modules I might otherwise ignore. I liked that real world examples were used to illustrate concepts and features. Parsing HTML pages, command line arguments and configuration files are common tasks in my daily life.

Some of this is a little over my head. That's good: I know I'm weak in some of these areas and need to learn more. This certainly looks like it can help me do that.

• Christopher M. Frenz
• Apress
• 1590595041

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Tony Lawrence 2005/09/04 Rating: 4.5