Pro Perl Parsing begins with several chapters devoted to key parsing principles, discussing topics pertinent to regular expressions, parsing grammars, and parsing techniques. This material sets the stage for later chapters, in which numerous powerful CPAN parsing modules are introduced, accompanied by an ample number of example applications.
Christopher M. Frenz has put together a real how to manual for those who use Perl for parsing. Grabbing the data you want from a file can be tricky but Frenz has taken parsing from the top shelf and placed it where any Perl programmer can use it. The opening chapter is great for anyone who has had trouble understanding how to use the regular expressions as built into Perl. He explains Pattern Matching, Quantifiers, and...
0Report
Wow! I do a lot of data parsing and this book is one of the best finds I have ever made. I should point out, however, that it is not for the average reader. This book is very technical in nature but absolutely fabulous if you are technically inclined or already proficient in Perl or have some experience parsing using another language. It seems that I am always finding strange problems that create a need to parse large...
0Report
Some of this was a little over my head. I'm "ok" with regular expressions, but when it gets into grammars, I'm a little weak and have some room to grow. That's OK: I know I need to learn more in this area. After all, what's the point of a book if it doesn't help you grow? I liked that this introduced and explained parsing related CPAN modules that I otherwise might have been afraid to touch (CPAN is a great resource, but...
0Report
This is a great book on parsing for novices that goes over the different kinds of parsing tasks, looks at the different tools available, and gives numerous examples. It's also a great book for experienced Perl programmers who have limited experience with parsing, other than Text::CSV_XS and regexes. The most time is spent on Parse::RecDescent, the most popular parsing module for Perl, but it doesn't give others, like Text::Balanced...
0Report
Pro Perl Parsing is a major advance to the field of programming Perl in general, and medical-text processing in particular (among many others). Pro Perl Parsing presents a unique conceptual framework for application of regexps, and goes beyond hinting on the importance of parsing for generating medical lexicons from massive sources of patient-specific encounter data. Pro Perl Parsing sets the stage (structure) for application...
0Report