The first part of this book, which discusses what a string is, storage, and basic methods is primarily geared towards beginners. Veterans should be able to skim through the chapters. Both should take a look at the performance metrics run by the authors, as they offer valuable insight into how strings are manipulated.

The chapter on Internationalization is not only great for anyone writing global applications but also those just looking to offer more configurability to their applications.

The price of this book is worth the 3 chapters on Regular Expressions. The authors introduce each concept with an example, building up to complete examples such as Analyzing an SMTP Log File.

I want to thank every author who working on the C# handbooks , Even the C#'s Guru programmers need this book , Whether you are a beginner or a pro you will need a complete understanding of the text manipulation in C#, and this is only in this book, I'm so sad that there's no more handbooks on C# like VB.NET :-(, The books cover all the aspects of text from A-Z (and that what i like in the book).
Thanks for all the authors
A Beginner

For a book of just over 300 pages, this wrox book surely packs a punch! Firstly U'r biceps don't ripple when U carry it around and U'r pecs don't enlarge when U lie down to read it!

Apart from the physical beauties of the book, it also contains a lot inside. I must admit, being a slightly above average developer, I was rather sceptical about the benefits of reading it but the reviews of the VB.NET version of the book got good reviews so I gave it a try.

... How misplaced my initial scepticism was! Reading the book showed me how ignorant I was about strings; the way they're created, handled, manipulated and destroyed! This book shows that strings are more than "Anything between 2 quotes" and shows how to optimise U'r creation and manipulation of them.

The greatest asset in this book is the information on Regular Expressions. This "Rocket-science-like" topic was reduced to bed time reading ... and the following morning, the knowledge gained the night before didn't "leak" from my head! The regular expression chapters "Eased" the concepts behind the subject into my head and the last chapter on regular expression chapters showed how the mind of a Regular Expression 'Guru' works. It's not the normal "Cook-Book" that pastes preformed expressions for common problems but a step by step analysis of the "thought process" that goes into building complex regular expressions ... "it doesn't give you a fish ... but it teaches you how to catch a fish U'rself"

What a wonderful book!! Ricoeur talks about his life, his journey through philosophy, his thoughts, feelings and much more. He talks about his encounters with some of our centuries great philosophers, such as Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel and Gadamer. From his childhood to his experience as a prisioner during W.W.II; talks about his teaching years in both Europe and USA (he makes an excelent analysis of the two cultures). A must read for anyone interested in philosophy, ethics, history, phenomenology, psychanalysis, religion, art, education, politics, european and american culture. A great introduction to his work and life. Very pleasant book. I highly recomend it!!

It is a good book and I can learn very lessons from this book

Readers should start a campaign to reprint and/or get a new edition of this book. Professor Paul Lorrain is not only a recipient of the Legion of Honor of France and the equivalent of Montreal, Canada, but his book is a work of CREATIVE GENIUS. His problems contain very interesting applications of electromagnetism which both the public and specialists can identify with, including magnetic monopoles (very strange theoretical entities with only one pole instead of the usual north and south poles of magnets - see my reviews of Kursunoglu, Frolov, Klapdor-Kleingothaus, etc.) that are predicted by physics Grand Unified Theories, superconductors which have turned out to have remarkably important uses today (and the ferromagnetism which is closely related to them), the earth's magnetic field which is related to modern geophysics, hysteresis which is related to an important modern branch of nonlinear mathematics as well, artificial satellites which are so important today, solar wind which is extremely important today, and even the theory of continuous creation of electric charge. In addition, there are many chapters on electromagnetics in relativity (see my reviews of Weinberg and Misner et al.), Maxwell's equations, magnetic fields, electric fields, plane electromagnetic waves (see my review of A. Bohm), guided waves, radiation. Lorrain makes electromagnetism interesting, open minded on new ideas, and interdisciplinary, all characteristics of Creative Genius. The general public should also hire consultants or tutors to summarize this book or even teach it to them - it is well worth the effort because its ideas apply to fields far beyond physics. It should be mentioned that Lorrain et al give excellent summaries in the book, but the general reader might want some of them translated into closer to elementary mathematics or even approximately English.

This is a great book in electromagnetics at the intermediate level.Has a lot of very well explained examples and covers a lot of theory too. Coverage of electromagnetics waves is excellent. Has a clear discussion of special relativity theory from an electromagnetical point of view.The book uses the mks system.I think this book is a must for any serious student of electromagnetics!

As with a lot of the wrox press books ; they are incredibly difficult to read; both literally and physically!!!;
you can't keep a page open because the book spine is so tight that it keeps flipping shut.
The book should start at the beginning and work its way through but instead it jumps into the deepend drowning newer users.
Really found this book annoying and although it has a lot of content and usefull code the format and delivery make it ultimately a waste of money (my opinion.)

Wow! Quite impressed! I have been programming in VB, C and Java for years. This book is a concise explanation of strings with great history for perspective and detail about .NET implementation.

This book reads very well and has great code examples. I suppose someone that doesn't know anything about programming shouldn't be trying to read a book about string encoding and regular expressions in the first place. This is not an introductoryto VB.net book (thank god!)

If you are an intermediate or greater developer that is new to .NET then this book is a must read. I've seen so many VB developers hurt themselves with string concat in VB. This book explains why and how the .NET framework solves those problems.

Regular Expressions is such a powerful tool. It is a shame that it took so many years for it to become part of the Microsoft arsenal. It has been used in Perl for decades.

It behooves every programmer to learn about the following three topics...

1] The StringBuilder class
2] Interning Strings
3] Regular Expressions.

Also, in the past, I have not been a big fan of wrox books. ..not sure why. I think, comparatively, they were hard to read. Even when reading topics that I thouroughly knew, I found the wording and layout less than ideal. It was probably just a bad group of editors. (There are even a few mispellings and mistakes in this book) However, I am a big fan of this new layout. Smaller books covering specific topics that you want to learn is the way to go.

This book is great. Get it.

Not only did this book live up to my expectations but it exceeded them. Wrox is really onto something with it's handbook series. It's what I've always looked for: a complete book on one subject that is all meat and no bones.

In fact, I used to learn various programming techniques from Wrox's "Programmers Reference" series for this very reason: all meat, no bones.

It's great having a book that doesn't spend hours explaining things the I already know and that gives me everything I need to know about the topic at hand. I've noticed on Amazon that there are several other books that fall into the Handbook series that are due out this year. I'm looking forward to them also.

While this book would be good for the beginner, I found it great for the Intermediate programmer looking to understand all of the power of string handling new to .NET. In fact, this book starts of with a great, highly technical discussion on how .NET and other platforms handle strings. This discussion isn't used heavily through out the rest of book but makes for better programming practices and good geeky water-cooler discussions.

From there, it's all very practical. The book explains just enough to make everything clear and avoids the all-too-common over-explaining that is a downfall of most computer books. I found myself re-reading the odd page 3 or 4 times to get the concept through my head. I would far rather do that then read a book that makes me want to pass out from boredom due to the massive over-explanation.

Plus different programmers might re-read different pages due to different understandings. Believe me, it's all there and it's all presented well. And since the book is only, like, 230 pages long (plus the Appendices), it's awesome. It covers as much as a 1000 page book but it's all laid out and explained so much better. You can use the 80% time savings to actually use what you've learned (or make fun of your manager, which ever is more valuable to you).

Lastly, this book is quite complete. Programming for different cultures and languages could honestly be a handbook in it's own right, but certainly this book gives you a great introduction and more. The regular expression coverage is a very completely introduction as is the string handling chapters at the beginning of the book. Oh, and the last chapter is like a regular expressions "Cook Book" with REALLY practical examples.

This book is fantastic to use as a learning tool and just as fantastic to have on your bookshelf for reference. Seeing that text manipulation is the name of the game when it comes to data, this book isn't leaving my side. Check it out - you'll love it.

This book is the worst. Anyone trying to learn electromagetism on their own or even in a class should definitely steer clear of this book. The writing is very terse, there are very few examples, and the few examples included are complicated, poorly done, and poorly explained.

And I find this an okay book. Hey other guy from Raleigh, was it really that bad? Do you think it's worse than the previous book, by Griffiths? Do you know of a much better EM textbook?

the last reviewer doesnt know what he/she is talking about. this is one of the best books around. the explanation is very clear
and is always geared toward understanding the physics of what the hell is going on. the examples are all practical and emphasize the physics. not just calculate "this" or "that" "here" and "there". just
go to a bookstore and take a look at the book and u see what i
mean. i was trying to understand what is the magnetic pressure
and i looked at 10 books, this one has the best illustration.
also the special relativity is very clear.