[berntb]

For regular expressions, I recommend "Mastering Regular Expressions".

I thought I knew REs before reading that book -- since I had both been using them for years and did a course on automata theory at Uni -- but that was just Dunning–Kruger.

Edit: Also write a templating system and be done with it, so you won't waste time doing it later. :-) When I first learned programming I did quite a few simple games and routines to find primes.