I like sed and awk, but I only use them every so often. As a result, I find it hard to remember details, so I got this book. On the whole, it is a decent reference, but not an excellent one.
I’m being nit-picky here, but heres an example :
In my most recent need for the book, I wanted to use a regexp in the match area like “/([0-9]):/{x = match1}”, but awk doesn’t have this feature. It would have been nice to have that explicitly said when I looked up the section on regexps in the index.
Should you buy the book ?? It depends.
If you are curious about these utilities and would like some nice examples and a reference then this is a good book. If you already have the basics down the pocket reference may be a better choice. If you already know some perl, then you might be better served learning how to do stuff like this with perl instead.
