When processing text files, the awk language is ideal for handling data extraction, reporting, and data-reformatting jobs. This practical guide serves as both a reference and tutorial for POSIX-standard awk and for the GNU implementation, called gawk . This book is useful for novices and awk experts alike. In this thoroughly revised edition, author and gawk lead developer Arnold Robbins describes the awk language and gawk program in detail, shows you how to use awk and gawk for problem solving, and then dives into specific features of gawk . System administrators, programmers, webmasters, and other power users will find everything they need to know about awk and gawk . You will learn how
I read this book because I need to write some scripts for work...despite being pretty old, AWK is an awesome language and this book is full of really nice examples that guide through the process of learning it the right way...I enjoyed reading it and while I'm not by any means an AWK expert...I feel pretty confident on writing useful scripts...so I believe that this book really paid off -:)