Pro Perl Parsing
I recently had the chance to read Pro Perl Parsing from Apress. Most System Administrators will find themselves scripting something at one time or another. Sometimes those scripts will have some type of data that needs split up: a passwd entry, a webpage, or even headers to an email. All of that is parsing and it's exactly what's covered in this book.
At first glance, I noticed how short the book was -- only about 250 pages. I'm a fan of short books. Small, more informative pieces of work are more easily memorable than massive monoliths of books. The contents of the book are nice as well. It goes over everything from theory to regular expressions, to hands-on cutting up data.
The theory contained in the book is more geared toward CS majors and not the day-to-day system admin. I'd even think that most of it could be included in an AI course. You'll learn how to break up lists and sentences into logical patterns, and for visualization, the book has it's fair share of logic charts.
The hands-on parts of the book are really nice, though. The book covers how to parse text with simple regular expressions and then quicker solutions using the more specific Regexp modules. Lessons on three types of data are included: plain text, HTML, and XML. Lot's of sub-types are included as well such as Date parsing and parsing RSS.
For being such a short book, it definitely covers it's topic well. Although some system admins will never run into the need for parsing, those who love to script are more than familiar with it. For those types, this book is a recommended read. I give it 8/10.