The AWK Programming Language

By Eric Schmidt

Awk was developed in 1977 at Bell Labs, and it's still a remarkably useful tool for solving a wide variety of problems quickly and efficiently. In this update of the classic Awk book, the creators of the language show you what Awk can do and teach you how to use it effectively. Here's what programmers today are saying: "I love Awk." "Awk is amazing." "It is just so damn good." "Awk is just right." "Awk is awesome." "Awk has always been a language that I loved." It's easy: "Simple, fast and lightweight." "Absolutely efficient to learn because there isn't much to learn." "3-4 hours to learn the language from start to finish." "I can teach it to new engineers in less than 2 hours." It's productive: "Whenever I need to do a complex analysis of a semi-structured text file in less than a minute, Awk is my tool." "Learning Awk was the best bang for buck investment of time in my entire career." "Designed to chew through lines of text files with ease, with great defaults that minimize the amount of code you actually have to write to do anything." It's always available: "AWK runs everywhere." "A reliable Swiss Army knife that is always there when you need it." "Many systems lack Perl or Python, but include Awk." Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 020107981X
• ISBN13: 9780201079814
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Pearson
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Amazing little language and book that will grow with you

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...

Classic Reference text on AWK

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...

Excellent reference

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.

A superb text on what Awk can do...and how to do it!

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.

This is an excellent reference book

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.