Tutorial Critique: Regular Expressions

Aug 1, 2013 • Nichole Bennett

 Likes:

In general, I liked the pacing of the lessons and that they reviewed the basic concepts of the last lesson. Conceptually, I liked the warning about bad design and the explanation of greedy matching. These tutorials were also good at pointing out which situations lend themselves to using regular expressions versus string search. I also liked that the tutorials used a working example to demonstrate the different tools available in regex.

Dislike:

I think the videos could have been a bit shorter or at least broken up into shorter (4-5 minute) pieces. There seems to be natural breaks where it would make sense to do this. Some prior knowledge (python functions) is required, so it would be nice to see this pointed out in the blurb or in the first lesson. Students new to python might get bogged down in the code and miss the main points of the tutorial. When showing the entire regex example, it might be useful to use some highlighting to show which part is being talked about. Highlighting would also be useful when explaining which arrow is being talked about in the finite state machines diagram. There are no exercises to practice and no resources for further study for someone looking to get some more experience.  There are also some ways that this tutorial might be tailored more for the specific challenges of regex. While I liked that an example was used, it might be difficult for the listener to keep track of all of the different topics. A cheatsheet or general outline might be useful for someone looking for a certain thing in particular. Having a more interactive lesson might also be useful. http://regexpal.com/ is an example of an interactive teaching tool for regular expressions that allows people to play around with (and make sure they are picking up what they think they are picking up)—something like this would complement the lesson very well.