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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

"Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl. While reading Dreamweaver 3 Bible I became intrigued by the Find And Replace options which included regular expressions. At the end of the chapter was a reference to Friel's classic and I found a copy in a local London library. That led me to "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall and the beginning of my career as a developer. The O'Reilly Perl collection is unsurpassed to this day.

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I came here to post that same book!

When I was a kid I wanted to make an IRC chatbot. I didn't know much, but I read online you could use regular expressions to match text commands. I felt like I needed a book, saved up money, and got my mom to drive me to the next town. Our little library didn't have any computer books. I remember her paging through and asking if I really wanted this "technical manual".

Mastering Regular Expressions was the start to my programming career as well. Having references to a bunch of other languages spurred my curiosity to learn them. I eventually bought some of the O'Reilly Perl books as well.

When you say "kid" do you mean teenage or younger? I was 39 when I started-out with Perl and server-side programming.

This was my first real "programming" book, and my first O'Reilly animal book and it changed the course of my life in a real and tangible sense. I read it cover to cover and did all off the exercises, and then moved right on to Learning Perl. To this day, I watch people struggle with regexes or dismiss them, but I'm done finding what they were looking for before they can finish complaining.

The appeal of Perl when I chose my first "real" programming language, after using Javascript for browser compatibility hacks, was that it was designed by a linguist with regular expressions built into the language as first class citizens. My flatmate at the time, who worked for a bank, was trying to persuade me that Java was the future but I took one look at Java's regex implementation, where you have to escape regex metacharacters, and nearly threw up. Java 17 still hasn't fixed this even after adding raw string literals.

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