Regular Expressions: Stop Copy-Pasting Patterns You Can't Read
This course is for a developer who has pasted plenty of regexes off Stack Overflow but freezes when asked to write or even read one. You can tell it "matches an email, probably," but \d, , +, ^, (…), and .+? are still line noise. The fix is not collecting more patterns to paste. It is learning the small alphabet a regex is built from, one piece at a time — literals, character classes, quantifiers, anchors, groups, alternation, and greedy-vs-lazy — until you can look at an unfamiliar pattern and say out loud what it does. We use JavaScript's regex syntax as the concrete vehicle, but the pieces transfer to almost every language.