Well, maybe not an entire 500 page book, though I'm sure it wouldn't hurt. You could always try Zed Shaw's the-hard-way book on the subject: http://regex.learncodethehardway.org/book/ (haven't read it but the the-hard-way books seem to be fairly well regarded)
I do take issue with your suggestion that you might not use this stuff all that frequently in your career. This is definitely at odds with my experience. Even though I don't use them that much in final-quality code, I use them all the time from the text editor, and quite often for quick one-off text manipulation or extraction scripts. Having a quick way to extract text from ad-hoc data can quickly get you a rough answer to a speculative question, the text equivalent of of back-of-the-envelope calculation, without needing to do a lot of work and without needing the question to justify a lot of work.
But I mainly use them for searching for one of two or three different strings in the text editor.
Comments
Well, maybe not an entire 500 page book, though I'm sure it wouldn't hurt. You could always try Zed Shaw's the-hard-way book on the subject: http://regex.learncodethehardway.org/book/ (haven't read it but the the-hard-way books seem to be fairly well regarded)
I do take issue with your suggestion that you might not use this stuff all that frequently in your career. This is definitely at odds with my experience. Even though I don't use them that much in final-quality code, I use them all the time from the text editor, and quite often for quick one-off text manipulation or extraction scripts. Having a quick way to extract text from ad-hoc data can quickly get you a rough answer to a speculative question, the text equivalent of of back-of-the-envelope calculation, without needing to do a lot of work and without needing the question to justify a lot of work.
But I mainly use them for searching for one of two or three different strings in the text editor.