Well written book on a useful programming tool.
By Arnold Robbins.
Published by O’Reilly 2015.
The book has three parts:
1) The awk language
2) Problem solving with awk
3) Moving beyond standard awk with gawk
4) Appendices
Topics in Part 1: Running awk programs, regular expressions, I/O, expressions, patterns, actions, variables, arrays and functions.
Part 2 first presents a library of useful functions, complete and ready to use. After that, we are presented with a grab bag of interesting applications based on the library.
Part 3 focuses on specific gawk features. I18n, debugging, arithmetic and extensions for gawk are the main topics.
Part 4 has appendices on the historical evolution of the awk language, installation and the GNU GPL.
Compared to the older book by Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan, this is less terse with more accessible examples and detailed explanations. In this way, it provides the reader with the information needed to understand awk.
Highly recommended to anyone who would like to include awk in their toolbox.