I am having a go at using AWK and find it very powerful. I have been following tutorials on the web (especially http://www.vectorsite.net/tsawk.html) but hate reading from a screen, so now is the time to buy a book.
A quick browse on Amazon yielded the info by one reviewer that many of the advertised books (by different authors) are virtually identical clones. This might mean that they are fantastically good - or that there aren’t many books on AWK. I would be grateful if you chaps (and chapettes) could recommend a tome that starts from the basics and keeps going to the more advanced stuff.
I’ve never really seen the point of awk, I see it included in a lot of scripts, especially build scripts, but it seems what it’s being used for could easily be covered with a variety of other unix programs such as grep, sed, and even inbuilt bash commands. Weird.
I have only scratched the surface of AWK but it does appear to have a broader range of functionality than grep & sed, and all in one place rather than having to learn separate functions.
My interest is just for fun rather than any practical need, as you will have discovered from my previous posts!
