Just last night I was explaining regular expressions to my fiancée who has absolutely no programming experience. I just showed her some fundamentals: 1) '[\d]'

Just last night I was explaining regular expressions to my fiancée who has absolutely no programming experience. I just showed her some fundamentals: 1) '[\d]' means any digit 2) '+' means one or more 3) '[\d]+' means one or more digits Understanding that is not hard or tricky at all. Using that to build a complicated regular expression is hard. I think that's the author's point. Understanding the concept of a pointer or recursion is not hard. Actually using those concepts to build something takes practice and hard work. edit: formatting