Gentlemen,
Thank you for the all the great input.
Specifically, you're learning perl regular expressions, and perl is
a language that gives you a million different ways to skin a cat,
so to speak. As the quote goes "all things are permissible, but
not all things are beneficial".
It's also a programming language that many people tend to describe
as looking like line noise (if you ever used an old dial up line,
in terminal mode instead of as a SLIP/PPP link, you may actually
get the joke ... especially if you had call waiting turned on).
I'm new to regex and SA (and open source for that matter) but I'm
actually old school tech. I remember well, the thrill of upgrading
from 2400 to 14.4k bps. One my fondest tech memories is bringing
online my own ISDN based 56k RAS in the 90's. And that thing has a
CLI that would make SA blush.
Between the two, yes, it feels very unstructured.
In addition to the other book that was recommended, it might be a
good idea to pick up Learning Perl. It's easier to understand a
thing when you know how it thinks.
I know what you mean. Being new to both, its been tough not knowing
when regex ends and SA begins. I'm used to being able to make
systems sing so coming in cold to a system this big and well
established (even while understanding the principals being used) is
intimidating. With your help, I'll have SA breaking a sweat in no time.
Dan
