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.

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Books by Alfred Aho