Help needed with regular expressions

[John Wheat]

  Good Day,

  I am seeking help to memorize, utilize, and gain basic proficiency 
with regular expressions and sed, grep, egrep searches and the like. 
When I read something like \^{a-r}\ my brain for lack of a bettwer way 
to say it believes this to be a ctl-d and stops all processing. So if 
you have a tool or an acronym or perhaps a silly song you have made up 
that would help me learn this aspect of CLI interaction would you please 
share that information with me.

John Wheat