Visual Basic .Net Text Manipulation Handbook

This is a great book. Period. Regular Expressions is a chaotic subject to start, I couldn't find usefull help on MSDN. This book does a great job bridging the gap. I'm still a novice in Regular Expressions (it's too spagetti-ish for a business software developer), but this book helped me implement whatever lightweight logic I needed. Then why 4 stars, you probably ask. Because I found it to be a little incoherent to pass the 5 star benchmark. The author is a little too all-over-the-place-ish. But it was well worth the money spent.

Wow! Quite impressed! I have been programming in VB, C and Java for years. This book is a concise explanation of strings with great history for perspective and detail about .NET implementation. This book reads very well and has great code examples. I suppose someone that doesn't know anything about programming shouldn't be trying to read a book about string encoding and regular expressions in the first place. This is not an introductoryto VB.net book (thank god!)If you are an intermediate or greater developer that is new to .NET then this book is a must read. I've seen so many VB developers hurt themselves with string concat in VB. This book explains why and how the .NET framework solves those problems.Regular Expressions is such a powerful tool. It is a shame that it took so many years for it to become part of the Microsoft arsenal. It has been used in Perl for decades. It behooves every programmer to learn about the following three topics...1] The StringBuilder class2] Interning Strings3] Regular Expressions.Also, in the past, I have not been a big fan of wrox books. ..not sure why. I think, comparatively, they were hard to read. Even when reading topics that I thouroughly knew, I found the wording and layout less than ideal. It was probably just a bad group of editors. (There are even a few mispellings and mistakes in this book) However, I am a big fan of this new layout. Smaller books covering specific topics that you want to learn is the way to go.This book is great. Get it.

Finally a publishing company (wrox publishing) has decided to do something very intelligent and useful in regards to VB.NET, by launching a series on specific topics that we developers are constantly banging our heads with. By reading VB.NET Text Handling I got a total different perspective for text manipulation techniques. As the book starts with great introduction especially on chapter 2 about Strings and builders it broads the way you stop thinking about Strings as sophisticated wrapper classes from a primitive data type. I was also very pleasant with the way that leads me to demystify some "pluming" idiosyncrasies I got through out the years.Chapter 5 introduces in a very transparent way how to start using Regular Expression where it glues so well with chapter 6 containing excellent applied approach for more complex uses of Regex.I would definitely advise to watch for chapter 7 where very tricky tasks are well explained and exemplified such as various types of validation and HTML TAGS MANIPULATION BEYOND LIMITS. If someone wants some actual information on how to put into practice commercial text manipulation I would recommend this book mostly because I will save hours of needless work