The preface will explain how much Perl the reader is expected to know, right?. Given the topic, I suggest that you assume they haven't worked with Perl regular expressions at all, in which case you should explain the s and m operators before you use them.

You don't have to spend a lot of time at it, but when I see "Learning..." in the title of a book, I expect the basics of the subject matter to be covered early, and re-emphasized in new sections (or new contexts). In chapter 2 you could say,

Perl's m operator is used to match patterns in a string, such as
m/Hello, world!/
The / marks delimit the pattern; any of Perl's quoting or bracketting characters can be used as well, though the / is the most traditional, and in fact the m operator can be left out if you use them.

In reply to Re: Regex Update: Chapters 1-3 rough draft by TheoPetersen
in thread Regex Update: Chapters 1-3 rough draft by japhy

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