I am trying to help a writer friend (or more preciously text worker, like copy-editing) to manage regular expression in editing work. This post try to get recommendation what book might do the work. I believe most of the knowledge he needs can be explained in a booklet of less than 64 pages with graphical illustration. A search on local book store and online book-store disappointed me a lot. There are only 3 types of regular expression book on the market: 1. The books that consider regular expression a science or an engineering method. Such books would emphasize precision over intuitiveness, prefer abstraction over examples. Typically, they would assume readers know what an Operating System is, what is a "string terminator" and so like. Such book I cannot give to my friends as training material as would triple my training hours compare to if I don't use a book at all. I have to explain a whole lot of concepts before getting him on the track, and he would spend so much energy to learn the concepts (what is an OS? NFA? DEA?) that he may forgot what I try to teach (like how to join lines with RE). 2. The books that consider regular expression a tool for programmers. Such book starts in the first page telling the difference of Perl regular expression, .NET and Java, and use program code to illustrate solutions. They assume you must programmed with a language. 3. VIM books and Emacs books with a focus on regular expression while regular expression is available in almost every editor except Microsoft products. Such books don't fit thanks to their assumption that the users are used to work with VIM/Emacs. The fact is even office workers who uses OpenOffice may well find good uses of regular expression. I think what my "student" need is simple knowledge of: * A short tutorial introducing features one by one, with examples. Better demonstrated with a most simple editor in order to reach most audience. * A reference with short examples. * A case book or scenario book with about 20 scenarios. Typical are: o To join lines that are previously line-wrapped, like that was done by fold(1). o To remove HTML tags. o To get a list of abbreviated terms. o To prettify a price table. o To match delimited text like CSV. o Stripping unwanted white spaces. o Insert formfeed at right places. o match URLs and emails. o ... The perfect book would assume the user only have two things with them: a problem and a text editor. I thankfully appreciate any hint on how to find a good book for the purpose but if your reply is of one of these topics please kindly remain in-top by saying nothing (sorry!): * Question the need of using regular expression when user is actually using "low level" products like OpenOffice. * Emphasize the necessarily of engineering background or engineer's abstracting ability as basis of using regular expression, so that to justify the need of learning abstract concepts (NEA, DFA, concept of "string" ...). * Recommend text workers to learn programming. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org