I have purchased the 3rd edition of “Mastering Regular Expressions.” I think it is a really
important book. I was always very good with the IBM mainframe pattern matching tools
but found the Unix pattern matching very obtuse. Your book is really helping me
understand how to use regex patterns. I have been using Unix for more than
two decades but found the documentation so poor on the regular expressions that I would
normally just write my own AWK or Rexx scripts to do the work. When I took a Perl class
I found that the chapter provided on regex was not much better than the man pages. I call
this explanation through cut and paste. Many an authors do not understand what they write
about so they just cut and paste from another. Your book clearly shows that you do understand
regex and can explain it to others. If you have the inclination, I recommend that you develop an
online module to teach pattern matching through the community college system. Many of the colleges online
course work allows one to be anywhere to either teach or take the class.

One question or comment might be, is there a set of test data files for the provided scripts in
the book?

Yours truly,

Ben Fisk