I always link to this blog post [0] by Jonathan Palardy. It was one of those eye opening articles for me that really helped me 'grok' it - and this is after hav

I always link to this blog post [0] by Jonathan Palardy. It was one of those eye opening articles for me that really helped me 'grok' it - and this is after having had a couple of stabs at learning it just from reading the text books on it. Awk for me is part of the layers of tools from grep/sed -> AWK -> perl one liner -> full on script. The further down the ladder you go, the more restricted you are, but this means that programs are terser and usually stay readable despite the terseness. I would also recommend Perl One liners [1] which did the same thing for me for Perl one liners and, subsequently, full Perl. [0] https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/ https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/ [1] https://nostarch.com/perloneliners https://nostarch.com/perloneliners