Drew McLellan, lead developer at Perch, wrote a pretty good article about rewrite rules, redirects and some other .htaccess wizardry. Thanks so much!
He explains what the strange symbols mean that actually are Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE). Drew gives some easy to understand examples for redirects, rewrite rules and matching patterns He explains some popular options and pitfalls and rounds it up with some useful snippets and links to more documentation. And don’t miss the comments, there is some useful stuff in there as well!