A co-worker of mine recently posted the following tip to an internal wiki:

Many people go to extraordinary lengths to escape slashes for use in the sed-style s/foo/bar/g command found in VIM, perl, sed, and many other tools. What's not widely known is that you can, in fact, use any character in place of those slashes. I regularly do something like this: sed -e 's,/usr/bin,/home/bin,g'

I blame gnu info for me not knowing this. I only use 'man', but lots of content is only available in 'info' pages. I never really understood why.