That's a little speed optimisation, with /\w{3}/ the regex engine sees the {} construct and has to start counting. If you write it out it's just three single characters in a row, so no counting => quicker.

Of course, this could be optimised by the regex compiler but that wasn't the case at the time of writing of Mastering Regular Expressions. At least this is where I got this from. As japhy is more up to date on this I assume he has checked that this optimisation hasn't been done in the meantime.

-- Hofmator