Yes, those two books are Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls. I have both, and they are good. In one of them there is a section or chapter with a few

Yes, those two books are Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls. I have both, and they are good. In one of them there is a section or chapter with a few examples of advanced uses of awk, involving awk's associative arrays, to do some non-trivial work in very few lines of code[1]. He shows or says that the equivalent programs in C would be much longer and harder to write. [1] Even more so than in most other common examples where awk programs are shorter than those in other languages.