The Awk Programming Language

One of the few books seen at Amazon.com with 5 stars ISBN 0-201-07981-x

"The AWK Programming Language" by AlfredAho, BrianKernighan, and PeterWeinberger is the complete reference for the AwkLanguage, and includes a brief chapter on programming style, one on program design, and one on testing.

It's almost a complete primer on programming for beginners.

It was written in 1988, and although the language and the interpreter has been improved over time, the grammar and the examples remain unchanged.

Anyone who read this years ago, and still writes a bit of AWK now and then should reread the middle chapters again. Then wait a few years and read the latter ones. What programming gems!

After rereading, ChrisGarrod has decided to abandon PerlLanguage -- it has major problems for me:

sysadmins put it anywhere at their whim, how do I

             #!/.../perl

portably?

           #!/usr/bin/env perl, of course. (suggestive rather than perfect)

it isn't on as many systems as AWK is -- awk is usually /bin/awk, and it may even be in the PosixStandard

awk is in /usr/bin on the systems I've used it. so's perl.