I'm a big fan of the programming language Python, and I've been using it for most of my day-to-day programming for about three years. Python programs are easy to read, primarily because the language is powerful and concise, and the standard library is almost comprehensive. I've been writing scripts to do text processing for almost ten years, working with perl, html, sgml, xml, and now python on many different occasions.

So I was pleased that I learned a few new techniques and tricks in the opening chapters of David Mertz's book. The chapter on regular expressions is particularly good. However, I expected a lot more from the chapter on state machines. The basic discussion is okay, but the examples could be beefed up, and the presentation of the relevant library modules is frustrating. There's a ton of information about mx.TextTools, but not enough to really make sense of it, and all of the other modules are glossed over with almost zero detail.

In all, I'm disappointed. The book doesn't offer much to experienced programmers, and it's too complex for beginners.