It's worth pointing out that most of what you learn about Perl regular expressions will be useful knowledge for many other areas of programming, database work, etc, because regular expressions are used in many places other than Perl.

(I say "most of what you learn", because I think the Perl regex engine is more extensive - offers a lot more stuff - than other implementations. Still, all the basic concepts and syntax are portable to other scripting languages, SQL and unix shell commands, among other things.)