One of my favorite books - I initially bought a copy based on a review by Brandon Rhodes [0]: > But the real reason to learn awk is to have an excuse to read t

One of my favorite books - I initially bought a copy based on a review by Brandon Rhodes [0]: > But the real reason to learn awk is to have an excuse to read the superb book The AWK Programming Language by its authors Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger. You would think, from the name, that it simply teaches you awk. Actually, that is just the beginning. Launching into the vast array of problems that can be tackled once one is using a concise scripting language that makes string manipulation easy — and awk was one of the first — it proceeds to teach the reader how to implement a database, a parser, an interpreter, and (if memory serves me) a compiler for a small project-specific computer language! If only they had also programmed an example operating system using awk, the book would have been a fairly complete survey introduction to computer science! [0]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/703174/2912179 http://stackoverflow.com/a/703174/2912179