Re:question for the floor (Score 2, Informative)

This book is not not really to teach you how to write regular expressions. This book teaches you to understand how your regular expressions will be parsed so that you can understand the impact of your approach and start creating expressions that are much more efficient, or that handle special cases more elegantly. It's the book that, in my case, took my skills to the next level. I still refer to it a few times a year, and am glad that it's a part of my library.