I'm no master but:

- the O'Reilly book on regular expressions in Perl is very good indeed,

- I've worked in many different languages over the years, and I find that helps. Although I don't have the detailed knowledge of Perl's workings that many people here have (and all respect to them!), I sometimes find it helps to think "well, if I was in lisp I'd do this, and if I was in C I'd do that, so maybe in Perl I should do it thusly"

Hth!

Best, a.