Regular Expression Puzzles and AI Coding Assistants: 24 puzzles solved by the author, with and without assistance from Copilot, ChatGPT and more Paperback – 24 April 2023

“Regular Expression Puzzels and AI Coding Assistants” is a relatively short book that presents puzzles to be solved with regular expressions (REs) and how to solve them elegantly. Each puzzle is followed by a discussion on how to solve it and then how AI Coding assistants solve it showing their usefulness and their limitations. This book is built on a previous version that didn’t have the AI Assistant discussion - so much of the content was not created on a whim just to ride the wave of ChatGPT as fast as possible. The Appendix has a quick and useful intro to REs - one wonders why this was not in the introduction. I would recommend all readers to read this first.I am a seasoned programmer. I use REs very frequently. However, I usually stick to the functionality I know well so reading this book was a good refresher. I also use chatGPT as a coding assistant and find it a very helpful starting point but more often than not would have to fine-tune to reach the desired end result. So I was also intrigued by the discussion of how to get the best out of it and other coding assistants.In this book, asking chatGPT/Copilot to solve the puzzles is brilliant. Some they achieve with elegant simplicity and others they totally fail at. Interestingly, they seem to have more problems developing test code than writing the code! The author tries to tune the prompt and either manages to find an acceptable solution or gives up and accepts that it’s too difficult for the LLM. For some puzzles that have a context such as the Genome Sequence or Poker, the LLM understood already what these were and provided well-educated responses. It was also interesting to see where the answer from chatGPT was simpler than the author’s - showing that an AI copilot can help simplify your ideas. Overall, I thought it was a very worthwhile read and a good reference to return to.I’m giving this 4 stars only because of the book's organisation (I would give 4.5 if that were possible). I think the appendix should go first and, in some cases, I needed a better explanation of some of the symbol combinations in the REs - I used chatGPT when unsure :-). Perhaps that was the author’s intention?

The book is not directly a way to learn regular expressions but it will very rapidly take you from being a user of them to being an expert.I have used regular expressions in various ways for many years and found I learnt a great deal from the approaches taken in the book. It often provided better ways to look at the problem and how to compare the results with those generated by CoPilot and/or ChatGPT. I found my self then using other generative AIs for coding more critically as a result.The book isn’t perfect and I found that sometimes I needed to read forward to get a good idea of what success looked like but I always learnt and that was a very big part of it.Well worth adding to your bookshelf as it will expose you to many challenging edge cases of writing more advanced expressions. My single ask of the author would be a set of test cases (via github or similar) to help code against as this would have enhanced the experience!

This is an intriguing concept for a book and its realisation is both well-written and presented in a way which encourages experimentation with very important new AI technologies and tools. Readers are set a series of interesting challenges of increasing complexity to solve using regular expressions. The 'manual' solutions by the author are then compared with the solutions provided by writing prompts for Google Copilot and also OpenAI ChatGpt. Readers are strongly encouraged to tackle each problem before looking at that of the author and the AI tools. The output of the AI tools is considered in some detail for each puzzle and there are comprehensive assessments of the AI answers, some of which are correct but also some of which are incorrect. It's very easy to try the puzzles oneself after installing the tools. The book provides a very technically instructive and entertaining way to learn about both regular expressions and essential AI tools and is a very worthwhile purchase.

"Regular Expression Puzzles and AI Coding Assistants: 24 Puzzles" is a short book and easy to finish. I have been using regex for a long time and still every time I have to use it I make sure to refer to the documentation. Regex has always been confusing for many of us. This book covers a lot with 24 puzzles and use of Chat GPT makes it fun to read. You will be amazed how fast you can solve the problem using AI. The author takes no shortcut in explaining to you in detail each puzzle and AI's output. This book definitely enhances my understanding of regex. As regex are so common and so much used I recommend this wonderful book to every developer.

This book gives better insight of regular expression. It start from the basic and teach you almost all the great concepts of regular expression which take years of hands of experience to master them. David has done a great job to keep you engage through the reading.He solved some real time problem (named Puzzles :) ) and along the way share lot's of golden rules/tips and tools. I think this is must have book for all software developer.

Takes you from a journey man knowledge of regular expressions to being awesome at regular expressions. With a ton of puzzles and guidance through out. How to catch the corner cases which can plague Regex development. Along with using the latest AI coding assistants to maximise your productivity.