Programming from A to Z
shiffman.net
shiffman.net
I completely agree with the idea of teaching regular expressions early on. I'm teaching a course in the winter and plan to make regex my first topic. Can't say it much better than Cory Doctorow did:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/dec/04/ict-teach...
> I think that technical people underestimate how useful regexps are for "normal" people, whether a receptionist labouriously copy-pasting all the surnames from a word-processor document into a spreadsheet, a school administrator trying to import an old set of school records into a new system, or a mechanic hunting through a parts list for specific numbers.
> The reason technical people forget this is that once you know regexps, they become second nature. Any search that involves more than a few criteria is almost certainly easier to put into a regexp, even if your recollection of the specifics is fuzzy enough that you need to quickly look up some syntax online.
> Knowing regexp can mean the difference between solving a problem in three steps and solving it in 3,000 steps. When you're a nerd, you forget that the problems you solve with a couple keystrokes can take other people days of tedious, error-prone work to slog through.