I don’t remember exactly when I started doing mod_rewrite stuff. I remember why. I noticed that more than half of the questions on #apache were about mod_rewrite, and I made a decision to become the expert on it. I was already very familiar with regular expressions, since I was a Perl programmer at the time, so I figured it couldn’t be very difficult.

I determined pretty early on that the biggest difficulty with mod_rewrite was that people were afraid of it. In particular, they were afraid of regular expressions. And there’s plenty of things floating about reinforcing this fear, not least of which is the mod_rewrite documentation itself.

So, now, several years on, I have a book about mod_rewrite, and in about 10 minutes I’ll be giving Yet Another conference presentation about mod_rewrite, which is nothing more than an affirmation that this isn’t hard (after all, I mastered it) but that there’s still a lot of people who need help with it.