From inside the front cover.
To Miriam, for making me complete.
To Chana, for the joy you bring us.
To Rivka, for the exponential increase.
To Nachum, for the added dimension.?
 
 

ISBN   1-88214-27-2   Price £15  UK
Written by Arnold D. Robbins          17 chapters, 4 appendices and index in 317 pages
 

Chapter List

Preface

    1.Introduction
    2.Getting started with awk
    3.Useful one line arguments
    4.Regular Expressions
    5.Reading Input Files
    6.Printing Output
    7.Expressions
    8.Patterns and Actions
    9.Control Statements in Actions
    10.Built in Variables
    11.Arrays in awk
    12.Built in Functions
    13.User defined Functions
    14.Running awk
    15.A library of awk Functions
    16.Practical awk Programs
    17.The Evolution of the awk Language

    Appendix A
         gawk Summary
    Appendix B
         Installing gawk
    Appendix C
         Implementation notes
    Appendix D
         Glossary

Synopsis

To quote the back cover,   GNU awk (gawk) is a text processing program that can make changes in files wherever specified patterns appear.  It can extract data from portions of lines wile discarding the rest.   So.......  This should give you a few clues ?
 

Review

Many computer users like to make changes in text files wherever there might be a pattern, they my also wish to extract certain types of data from various lines whilst leaving the rest.  If you were to do this with C or Pascal it would take a long time.  So awk is said to make life much easier.

I won't bother to try to give a more detailed explanation than this but you have to believe me when I say that this book is for you if you want to use awk.    Many examples in the book are said to take their input from two sample data files..  Towards the back of the book there is a review of the evolution of the awk language.  This makes for interesting reading in itself.

To sum up then.    If you need this book please do go ahead and buy it.   All funds raised on the sale of this book are used to support the development of free software and free documentation.
 
 

Review by Richard Ibbotson