This is a digg entry leading to a blog page about tweaking .htaccess to achieve your ends.
It is very good. Like most things (this blog included) it is not perfect and you may well discover better / alternative ways to do things but for 80% of the population who need to mess about with .htaccess this will help.
It is quite serendipitous that I came accross this today as I was in the process of fighting with the .htaccess on a site I am looking after. While this tutorial hasnt been the perfect answer, it did help me notice a common mistake I had made which was causing the problem (embarassingly it was a case of me forgetting about inheritance!).
All in all – well worth checking this out.