I've never been really good with regular expressions, especially once it gets beyond the basics. But they're unavoidable, and undeniably useful. If you're like me, the Regular Expressions Cookbook is an ideal candidate for your developer bookshelf. 

At first glance the book looks a bit too big - how much can there be to regular expressions after all? Turns out the answer is 'a lot'. Starting at the very basics, and moving onto more complex tasks such as XML manipulation and processing log files, this book serves as a one stop shop for regular expressions.  

The book contains about 140 different 'recipes', helping you to validate email addresses, credit card numbers and URLs.  What's more, each example covers eight different languages, so you'll be able to implement the regular expression recipes in C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby or VB.NET.  

The book is well laid out, and will be easy to follow for novices. It's value comes later, where you can use the sensible index and list of examples for quick reference later.