You might consider purchasing O'Reilly's "Programming Perl", 3rd ed. It's an excellent complement to the Perl Cookbook for learning the language. Chapter 5, Pattern Matching, is both a tutotorial as well as a definition of the RegEx language. It would provide you a good, complete base on which to attack creating and decoding complex pattern matches.

The book overall is just as good in teaching the rest of the Perl language, environment, "culture", and serving as a technical reference.

Andy

@_="the journeyman larry disciple keeps learning\n"=~/(.)/gs,
print(map$_[$_-77],unpack(q=c*=,q@QSdM[]uRMNV^[ni_\[N]eki^y@))
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