I kind of skipped over it in my journey into the world of Unix... I usually either (bash shell scripting, tools like cut and grep + pipes and redirection) or use python.
I have a rule of thumb that I'll buy and read any book which Kernighan is an author of regardless of subject. He's more or less the gold standard of technical writing for me.
Cool, thanks for the suggestion! Are the basics pretty much unchanged? I see that edition is from 1988. I like free stuff, but I don't mind paying if you think a more recent edition is worth the $.
_The AWK Programming Language_ ( https://smile.amazon.com/AWK-Programming-Language-Alfred-Aho... ) is one of the best programming books, on any language, in my opinion. Worth reading even if you don't use awk. In less than 200 pages it covers an introduction to the language, through to implementing a relational database, recursive-descent parsing, and graph-based algorithms.
For gawk, the manual covers the gaps between the language introduced in the book and the latest implementation.
The 6 page summary in the 7th edition manual turned out to be comprehensive while still being approachable. I knew next to nothing about awk, not counting some snippets found on the web, after reading through this document twice awk feels like home.
I kind of skipped over it in my journey into the world of Unix... I usually either (bash shell scripting, tools like cut and grep + pipes and redirection) or use python.