That is a nice book. Starting with a practical tutorial and going into the structure and language features afterwards on a reasonable page count of just about 2

That is a nice book. Starting with a practical tutorial and going into the structure and language features afterwards on a reasonable page count of just about 200 pages. I like to use awk when I need something a little more powerful than grep. Nevertheless, when I look at the examples and where the book is heading I prefer R for many of the tasks (in particular Rscript with a shebang). Just to give an example: If you have to manipulate a CSV file, that would most certainly be possible with awk, but some day there might be a record which does contain the separator and your program will produce some garbage. R on the other hand comes with sophisticated algorithms to handle CSV file correct. I truly respect awk for what it was and is but I also think that the use-cases where it is the best tool for the job has become very narrow over time.