Customer Reviews

The AWK Programming Language

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is THE bible for awk users. If you refuse to use perl, which incorporated most of awk, or have to maintain old awk scripts then this is the text. I like the O'Reilly text for learning the basics, but after that you need this guide. For some tasks awk is the premier solution, for others, use awk as part of the solution along with perl and a shell script. Still a cool language. And this book is very helpful for both beginning intermediate programmers of awk and advanced users.

The AWK Programming Language was written very well. The first couple of chapters describe the language and the rest are full of real-world examples. The exercises at the end of each section are very helpful and expand on the examples given. Any one who works with flat data files should be familiar with awk, and this is the book to get the job done.

While the Nutshell book is more of a reference guide, Aho's shows how to really use the language with practical examples.

From basic examples to flatfile reports and using Awk to try out language issues in compiler design.

For those who know Awk there are some great ideas in here. For those who are just starting out it's an excellent way to ease yourself into writing Awk scripts.

A script writers must have.

In Unix today, several scripting languages exist: awk, perl, tcl and python. Awk is a small, easy-to-learn, yet powerful programming language, and is language of choice for quick, think- and analyze-on-the-fly tasks. This book is written by the inventors of this wonderful language. It provides an excellent introduction to the language, with many practical examples for day-to-day use. Over many years, it has also served as a good reference to the language. In addition, this book gives concise introduction to numerous fundamental algorithms in computer science (interpreter, calculator, parser, sorting, graph algorithms, ..), which I consult for complex tasks even today.

Always a joy to read! Highly recommended.

I've become a big fan of Awk. Some people may tell you that Awk is outdated and no longer useful; not with other languages such as Perl and Ruby available. Well, Awk does one thing and does it well. It does it "fast enough" most of the time, and does it with a very small language.

Perl and Ruby are fine, but if you lean towards "small is beautiful", you must learn Awk. For times when you need it, it's a Godsend. I've used it recently to automatically generate SQL insert statements from some flat files and to do automatic code generation for larger languages.

Some of the best tools have survived the test of time.

In this book, I feel like I learned all the things I need to know about Awk - all the way from beginner to advanced. It's a classic. Not a lot of books get five stars for me. This book fulfills it's goals perfectly, so deserves a perfect rating.

I found this book to be well written and to the point. I was able to quickly learn the basics. Yet the book is also a valuable reference book covering all facets of the language. I would highly recommend it.

This is a wonderful book -- but the price is ridiculous. I purchased a paperback copy of "The Awk Programming Language" about 15 years ago, and its price was in the $20 range. Times change, and prices go up, but $73 for a 200-page book, even if it is a hardcover, verges on outright theft.

Which is a shame, because this is a great book, written by the men who developed the language. In addition to a lengthy tutorial, it contains many examples of sophisticated programs that can be constructed from the simple tools provided by Awk. Anyone who supports computers for a living, whether in the Unix or Windows environment, can find valuable ideas here.

But the price: c'mon guys, you've got to be kidding. This book has been in print for 20 years now. You've long since made back the initial costs of publishing it. The authors are famous in computer science circles, and have written many other books. I'm sure they don't need the money. So I have to conclude that this is just a cash cow for the publishers.

If you're looking to learn about Awk, and you're on a budget, I would suggest "Effective Awk Programming" by Arnold Robbins. It's available in PDF form as a free download. If you'd like to support the author, buy a printed copy of the book, as I did. Published by O'Reilly, it's available in paperback at Amazon for about $26.

And if you can find a reasonably-priced copy of "The Awk Programming Language", by all means, grab it. It's a classic. Thanks to the publishers, however, it's a classic that's out of most people's reach.

I think this is the best AWK reference book around. Easy to read and understand references and examples. As a beginner I was able to start quickly, and now it still makes a fine reference to the finer points of using AWK.

Along with sh, AWK is one of the original scripting languages. Before I learned Perl or any of the newer languages (python, etc), I wrote scripts combining shell and awk. I had a template that I used over and over for combining shell and awk. The book I used to learn AWK and I continuously referred to was this book. The examples cover the cases where you use AWK as a filter or for prototyping. The nicest feature of AWK: it really is a *little* language. It has a couple of precedence issues when reading in a file, but these are explained and the *fix* is shown. Overall, a complete introduction to AWK syntax and idioms, and with many useful examples.

Chapter 2 of The AWK Programming Language serves as the formal definition of the language, written by its creators. There is no other published standard or official document. So this book is the primary, definitive resource for all issues related to the awk programming language in general. Other awk resources (e.g., the GNU awk manual) should be regarded as secondary and treated as subordinate to The AWK Programming Language. It is especially important for contributors to the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.awk to bear this in mind when posting general, version-independent information about awk to that newsgroup.

Owning this book is a prerequisite to becoming an expert awk programmer. Though there are other resources available for learning awk, both in print and on the Internet, none of them are as succinct and as straighforward as The AWK Programming Language.