Hey everybody.

I have struggled with understanding regular expressions for a while now, but after reading the tutorial below, I feel I have a very good grasp on what they mean.

http://regexone.com/

If you have any similar experiences, or want to post your favorite tutorials (for whatever) please share.

I found another handy tutorial set on windows batch (.bat) scripts here :

http://www.robvanderwoude.com/batchfiles.php

and some useful tricks here :

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/245395/hidden-features-of-windows-batch-files

I already understood the basics, but I really got a good understanding of regular expressions when I learned Perl. I started by reading the manual pages, written as "perldocs", distributed with each system. I pretty much read the first 10 or 20 files. Perl has excellent documentation. Along the way, there was the section on regular expressions, which are obviously extremely powerful in Perl. I would recommend that as a way to understand regular expressions, though it would probably come in handy to learn the basics of Perl first so you were able to try it out in its proper environment.

I'm testing it out to learn Ruby. But the pace is SO SLOW>>>>. I'm on lesson 10 or so and it's still teaching me how to set variables.

EDIT
Codecademy's tutorial is for people who don't even know what a variable is. It's really not up to snuff for someone who already knows how to code. I found that Ruby In Twenty Minutes is a pretty good primer to start learning Ruby.

This is classic bamccaig. I would totally put this in my sig if I wasn't already quoting classic Piccolo. I despise man pages. :/

Your website looks really useful. I will definitely keep that bookmarked.

A good strategy to break regular expressions up is white-space. In Perl you have /x that will ignore white-space within the actual regular expression (including newlines). It also enables the use of comments within it (prefixed with a '#' character as with other Perl comments). By allowing you to separate the ideas within a regexp it becomes much easier to reason about it. And obviously comments help too. Some other engines also support this concept. If the regexp is non-trivial it is recommended to use this technique. You then match white-space characters using character classes or character sets.

As for your description of Code Academy, that sounds about what I recall from whatever glimpse I was able to get years ago... I don't generally give those kinds of sites much credit because they're obviously just trying to get rich by withholding information which I believe to be unethical.

The keyboard shortcuts are not intuitive at all, nor are they available easily, for either. I always struggle just to quit the stupid program and get it's junk off my screen. It's a GUI wannabe.

Experience on the command line helps. 'q' is often the way to "quit" interactive programs on the command line (Ctrl+C is another common way, better if the program is doing something you definitely don't want done right now). It's very much standardized. I'll stand behind 'info' being very unwieldy and uncomfortable. I've made some attempts to learn it and can still barely accomplish the most basic navigation. I practically never find what I'm looking for in info documentation. Man pages on the other hand tend to be awesome. Most information is on that single "page" (or pager), and it reads very well. If you need to find specific information you can easily search the document. You won't always find what you're looking for, but sometimes the software just doesn't do what you're looking for. In my experience, when the software does what I'm looking for I find it 9/10 in man pages. I'm sure it would be in the info. documentation too, but the problem with that is that it's fragmented and the navigation is unintuitive unless you're an Emacs user. I've tried to learn that too, and all that I learned is that it's painful to edit using Emacs compared to Vim. But again, I know enough for basic navigation.