GAWK: The GNU AWK User's Guide

Rating:
Summary: excellent reference/tutorial for standard Unix utility
Review: Awk has been one of the basic building blocks in Unix for over 25 years now. GNU awk has a number of useful extensions, including network programming and sorting.

This is the standard manual for GNU awk. It includes both tutorial sections for those new to awk, and reference material.

It has had numerous revisions since the 1999 version which the first person here reviewed. I do agree with him that if you are completely new to Unix, it is not the place to start.

gawk is free software, and this book is free documentation.

Rating:
Summary: excellent reference/tutorial for standard Unix utility
Review: Awk has been one of the basic building blocks in Unix for over 25 years now. GNU awk has a number of useful extensions, including network programming and sorting.

This is the standard manual for GNU awk. It includes both tutorial sections for those new to awk, and reference material.

It has had numerous revisions since the 1999 version which the first person here reviewed. I do agree with him that if you are completely new to Unix, it is not the place to start.

gawk is free software, and this book is free documentation.

Rating:
Summary: Good reference to a expert awk user who wants to try Gawk
Review: I bought this book for my computer science course. The author says the quality of the book is bad because he worked hard to maintain the price low. But, personally, I would buy something more visually appealing even if I have to pay 10$ more. Moreover, the author assumes that people know everything about Unix and Gawk, thus for a person like me, it was kinda hard to keep up with the book. However, once you are familiar with the Gawk, this book is kinda good as a reference. If you know Unix and maybe Perl, It can be a good choice. But if you are a JAVAer or C++er and know nothing about Unix.. stick with online tutorial...