Actually, AWK is a domain specific programming language. When you start treating AWK as such then you can really gain an appreciation for it. I too treated it as a dumb one liner relegated to ingesting cryptic regexp one liners in shell scripts. After reading the original AWK book it completely changed my outlook on the language. I had no idea you could define functions or perform basic math so one could use it for very basic tabular operations such as spread sheets. AWK can even be used as a standalone language outside of shell scrips by writing a program, insert a shebang on the first line calling awk, and mark the file as executable.
shebangs and more complex scripts are covered in the article.
But yes, I agree that the original AWK book is really good. After covering some basics and the language reference, it has some fun projects that you can build with AWK.
Actually, AWK is a domain specific programming language. When you start treating AWK as such then you can really gain an appreciation for it. I too treated it as a dumb one liner relegated to ingesting cryptic regexp one liners in shell scripts. After reading the original AWK book it completely changed my outlook on the language. I had no idea you could define functions or perform basic math so one could use it for very basic tabular operations such as spread sheets. AWK can even be used as a standalone language outside of shell scrips by writing a program, insert a shebang on the first line calling awk, and mark the file as executable.