I consider awk to be the most useful and underused language in the UNIX ecosystem. I use it daily to analyze, transform, and assemble data, and it always blows my mind that so few people really know how to use it at a decent level. This is an excellent book to give a real idea of what awk is capable of.

I think my hiccup is that it seems like good awk programmers are expected to be able to pass the full bloody program in as a simple string argument in a bash one-liner. Which is clearly not tenable.

There are a few things I have done which felt more difficult than they should. However, the vast majority of dealing with structured data using awk really has been a pleasant surprise.

if you're interested, you could give my tutorial(https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...) a try

it has over 300 examples..