Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

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Softpanorama Classic Series

The AWK Programming Language by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan  Peter J. Weinberger See the introduction to the series for more information

AWK is an elegant pattern scanning and processing language that was an important inspiration for later languages. It is well-suited for small projects involving text processing or formatting, and has some useful features for small database applications. Its features for pattern description are derived from those of the grep family of standard Unix tools. Awk is one of the early tools to appear in Version 3 UNIX and gained popularity as a way to add computational features to a UNIX pipeline. Unfortunately it was never fully integrated into shell and that created a lot of problems with using Unix programming environment that otherwise would be neatly solved.

This book contains the original description of Awk written by the authors. The clarity of description of concepts and tradeoffs make this book a classic. See also The AWK Programming Language

• Textbook Binding: 210 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.44 x 9.22 x 6.26
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co; (January 1988)
• ISBN: 020107981X

10 Stars, April 2, 2002     Reviewer: Ramesh B Kanagaraj (see more about me) from Euless, Texas United States I wish I can give 10 stars for this book. This is a bible.

The awk bible a must have tome for all Unix power scripters, October 25, 2000     Reviewer: A reader from Seattle I second the feeling here, this awk book is the most concise, clear and useful scripting book on unix period with the exception of perl. Its also a job life saver. At work we can't use perl on our unix servers because of management attitudes so awk and sh are the only tools to script with. Become a Unix power scripter with this cool book!

AWK abundance, May 14, 2000     Reviewer: Per Kistler (see more about me) from Zurich, Switzerland This small book is packed with relevant tutorial material and examples about AWK (nawk). Since nawk is the only thing besides KSH which one has available on every UNIX system, it is absolutely essential to have a good handling of it. At many places one is not allowed to use Perl/Tcl/Python, but AWK they cannot take away, because the system needs it. And this book is the only one which presents awk in it's full power. It contains a concise reference at the end, which is very helpful. Although gawk can do more and has a nice book, it is so, that if one can install gawk, one can as well install perl. So I think, that gawk, as far as it can do more than nawk is useless. But it's not useless below, because then one can programm nawk on linux as a preparation to use it on some UNIX server. This is important for the book to choose. Because a gawk book contains many nice things which are not available to the nawk programmer.

Last modified: February 28, 2008