linux

Say what you will about the depth of this book. I am here to tell you that on more than one occasion this book has saved my bacon. Several times in different environments I needed to use sed to correct data in flat files. Once I used sed to change the format and numbers when we wanted to match accounting numbers to a different system. I haven't used that much awk. However there has been occasion to transfer awk programs from one Unix to a different Unix flavor. I found that the regular awk in this book was newer than the newawk in the other system. I Still keep the book handy incase I get squeezed for time and have to manipulate files. However I am learning more and more to appreciate PERL on those occasions.

This is a typically great book from O'Reilly Press. I find this book to be invaluable when I need to look up how to do something with sed or awk.

It takes you through the basics of sed and awk, shows you regular expression syntax and delves deeper into both programs. For sed it shows you all of the basic sed commands as well as many of the more advanced commands such as multiline pattern spaces. With awk it goes even deeper as awk is a more powerful program. It shows the basics for writing awk scripts then takes you into flow control, functions and debugging.

I find the writing to be concise and clear with many examples to show you how it works in the real world.

All in all it's a great book for the unix admin or programmer to have on their bookshelf.

I've had this book for 3-4 years now and find it to be mu handiest refernce. I even use ot more than my vi book.

The raw power of sed and awk will humble even the proudest VB programmer and this book will help you get the most out of both the "Aho, Weinberg and Kernigan" and the "stream editor".

The first chapter section is entitled "May You Solve Interesting Problems" a paraphrase of the old Chinese curse, but with sed and awk no problem seems insurmountable and wil make all problems appear interesting.

This book is an outstanding reference and will get you up and running with both of these handy little programs in no time.

Just to give you an example - the first time I ever used these programs (sed and awk) I developed a cron script to query a database every day at midnight, sort the results, grabbed lines with tagged values within certain limits, added a few totals, did some averaging, "starred" the lines that departed from certain parameters, then formatted the results into a report with a header showing the dates, times and query results, statistics then packed them into a report file and e-mailed them to a dozen recipients and added a few recipients if the data was outside certain values.

I did this remarkable feat by copying a few examples from the book, changing a thing or two and in the end had a little shell script that was a few K-bytes at the most.

This VB guy from corporate worked on a VB version of the same function and ended up with six revisions, several megs in the executable and never was able to get it formatted right. Not to say that it couldn't be done but..... I wrote mine before lunch one day. He worked on his for weeks and weeks.

Such is the power contained within should you want to tap it Grasshopper.

Great book. Amaze your friends and colleagues. Have the office women ( or men) throw flowers at your feet as you enter every day - well maybe not, but this will make you more productive.

You real nerds will hardly get finished with a single box of Pop Tarts before you are writing really cool scripts when using this book.

Like all O'Reilly books this one is terse, practical and highly usable - just like UNIX.