"Mastering Regular Expressions"

Chuck recommends Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition, by Jeffrey Friedl, published by OReilly. Includes separate chapters on Perl, Java, .NET, and PHP. A full index to the book (along with chapter specific code and snippets) is available at the companion site: http://regex.info. Regular expressions contain two types of characters: metacharacters (e.g.,the wildcard * in *.txt) and literals (i.e., normal text characters). Lots of technical details, though, and 542 pages, so not sure how quickly I can read it through.