htaccess url'redirects and rewrites - .htaccess

Question

Hope someone can help me out 'cause I utterly suck at .htaccess tweaking.
I'm developing a php based site. On this site I include specific pages based on a query string
eg: index.php?q=somePage.
In the .htaccess I look for eg: /somepage/ and tell the server to load q=somePage. When this is done the server strips all other query strings from the url ergo it does not pass them.
Now to the question, is there someway to setup the .htaccess to catch the [q] parameter and pass along all other querystrings (server side)?
eg: if I call /somepage&parameter=someparameter or /somepage/&parameter=someparameter the server will rewrite the url to /somepage/ but call the page (serverside) like so:
index.php?q=somePage&parameter=someparameter
Here's how my htaccess looks now:
Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ index.php?q=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/$ index.php?q=$1
if not I guess I'll just have to store the parameters in a session and pass 'em that way. But I hope someone can help :)
PS: If you know of a book that deals with the htaccess and can bring me from complete n00b to expert, it would be epic if you could point me in the right direction. the same actually goes for regEx ;)

Answer 1

Usual lot of framework move the logic of parsing the request inside the PHP
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)\?*$ index.php/$1 [L,QSA]
If the URL not identify a file or e dir, pass it to index.php
EDIT
You can see http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/regex.htm for an introduction to regexp, but the suggest htaccess pass ALL the parameters to index PHP.
Use phpinfo(); to see how your reqest is seen by PHP
As your request here the index.php
<?php
phpinfo();
here some query you can try (I suppose your code on root of localhost):
http://localhost/
http://localhost/test
http://localhost/a/b
http://localhost/?p1=v1&p2&v2&p3&p4
http://localhost/a/b?p1=v1&p2&v2&p3&p4
http://localhost/a/b/?p1=v1&p2&v2&p3&p4