Codefetch Searches Programming Books
Lately I’ve been trying to find a good book on Python, but I haven’t had time to get to a bookstore and actually browse through the many similar offerings, which is what makes Codefetch invaluable. Codefetch is a search engine that lets you search inside programming books for phrases, words, or bits of code.
Codefetch has been around for a while, we even mentioned briefly in an article last year on Wired.com, but this is the first time I’ve actually tested it.
Codefetch lets you search by language (22 options) and supports a healthy amount of regular expression operators. There’s also an option to search “literal,” which means you can match programatic expressions — spaces and all.
Results are displayed with your terms highlighted and showing the chunks of code were your search terms appear. At the top of each booking listing is a link to purchase the book from Amazon (which is how Codefetch generates some revenue).
There may well be a way to perform this kind of search using the tools on Amazon, but I’m not aware of it. An entry on the Codefetch blog claims the site has considerably better search results than O’Reilly’s paid Safari service.
A word of warning, Codefetch made the front page of Digg this morning and was running somewhat slow.
