The book that never was
After I finished my C# book, I looked around for something else to write about. After some thinking, I decided to write a regular expression book that was focused explicitly on the .NET version of regular expressions. Mastering Regular Expressions is a pretty good book, but it suffers from trying to cover too much and at the time, didn't talk about .NET at all.
So, over a period of about a year, I spent time working on the book. (what I probably should have been doing was working on updates to my C# book, but that wasn't very appetizing at the time). After a while, I showed it to some friends, who gave me their honest feedback, which was, "well, yeah, um, we think it needs a lot of work".
They were right, and I have found no desire to spend the time required to get it good enough. But when I'm in a lamenting mood, I lament the fact that there's a bunch of content that I wrote that could be useful. I toyed with posting both the kit and the kaboodle , but that whole "needs a lot of work" thing means that that's probably not the most helpful thing.
So, here's what I'm going to do. One of the unique (or at least rare) things that I did was come up with a series of 25 regex exercises, so I'm going to post one, let people chew on them for a while, and then post my answer. And repeat that at intervals resembling but not precisely equal to a week.
