I agree you don’t need “whole books or manuals”, but how do you learn by trying alone? The search space is enormous, and even if you stumble on a code fragment

I agree you don’t need “whole books or manuals”, but how do you learn by trying alone? The search space is enormous, and even if you stumble on a code fragment that appears to work, how do you know your code actually does what you think it does, and how do you know there isn’t a more efficient or readable way to do what you want to do? Case in point, you wrote: > then extrapolate from there using {}, (), replacing, etc. How did you find out about those, if not from reading (likely followed by some trying to check your understanding)? I think you have to read, not “whole books”, but ‘just’ the right documentation, where ‘right’ depends on the tool you use. For example man regex may be sufficient. That, you can read in a few minutes.