I learned “on the job” (mainly from using AWK and Perl) but I’d guess any decent book on Perl would be a good place to start. There are however lots of Regex 101 sites on the net, for example…

http://www.icewarp.com/support/online_manual/203030104.htm (very simple introduction)

http://www.regular-expressions.info/ (a bit more info)

http://www.editgrid.com/user/ken/REGEX_tutorial (regex in a spreadsheet!)

to ..
http://regexp.resource.googlepages.com/analyzer.html
or
http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/
…if you wish to see a visual analysis of your regular expressions.

Tom

Thx,
JP

Yep, no sign of activity since the Oct/Nov of last year.

Tom

Tom

Yes, Talend (or Pentaho PDI aka Kettle) is what you need if you intend to do serious heavy lifting of data, but to be fair to Apatar, their product has improved a lot since I wrote this (including the addition of an Excel component!). Even so, even for ’simple’ mashups, I find Talend a more rewarding tool to use, particularly now that I’ve “rediscovered” Groovy as a scripting language for Talend.

Tom

In any case, Apatar is, indeed, more geared towards data mashups. In order to perform ETL, a tool that can manage great quantities of data is required, and in the open source world I do have been running into Talend Open Studio a couple times.

Sorry about the bad links and for not realising that Akismet had relegated your comment to spam!!

I’ve updated the links but the http://www.alestic.com/ site appears to be down at present.

Thanks for the AMIs, impressive stuff!

Tom

I have indeed, it’s very good, but I think it’s destined to remain a niche (yet obviously successful) product unless it manages to get a major brand behind it. But perhaps that’s not what DabbleDB want, perhaps they wish to remain as a small, independent and profitable (hopefully) company.

Tom