Introduction to Regular Expressions

Good book. The writing is direct and the author is honest about limits.

I read this over a couple of weekends alongside a small side project, which turned out to be the ideal way to approach it. Some of the material is available elsewhere, but rarely presented this clearly. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. Recommended, with the caveat that it is not a gentle introduction.

Finally, a book that treats databases & big data with the care it deserves.

I picked this up after getting stuck on a project and it turned out to be exactly the right book at the right time. The index and cross-references are surprisingly good, which matters for a book I will come back to. The balance between theory and practice is well judged; neither side dominates. I have already recommended it to two colleagues and will recommend it to more.