in reply to book vs. web for Perl Regex study?

perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html might be a good place to start.
or
this uk university site
or
the Enginsite site

Better yet, perhaps, browse all of those, playing with regexen in their examples and puzzles; then -- when you start to get comfortable -- get Friedl. As prior respondent said, it's very worthwhile to have -- on a (handy, nearby) shelf -- but (IMO, ymmv) is not really a great place to start, in part because of its unusual markup, which adds a learning curve to the Regex learning curve.

That said, you could do far worse than buying a copy now, and see if it works for you as a tutorial.

Updated: For clarity, changed word order in 2nd sentence of first narrative graf.

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Re^2: book vs. web for Perl Regex study?
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 07, 2010 at 18:45 UTC
    Lots of good ideas here. I will simply suggest that, when you start writing regexes, pick one tool and stick with it. And Perl seems to have the most comprehensive regex engine of all, so it's a great tool to use for learning regexes.

    As Friedl points out, the implementation of regexes is somewhat tool-specific. Don't do like I did and expect your Perl regexes to work in vi, or Java, or Oracle, or other regex-enabled tools. Often they won't until they're modified.

    Then again, don't panic. It's mostly knowing when you need to escape a character, but it still made me crazy for a while. Learn the basics using one tool, on one platform, and only then start crossing tools and platforms.

    Just one dumb old DBA's opinion...

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