Dale Dougherty

I don't know -- this could just be an impression, and a mistaken one at that, but it seems to me that back when O'Reilly was one of a few big tech publishers, their books were better written and had more character.

This is one of those. sed and awk are two -- at this point -- almost primordial UNIX tools. Perl was famously started by Larry Wall when he was working on a tough problem and, as I think he put it, "awk ran out of steam."

I use awk at work but only in a very limited way, and am interested to know more. I've only used sed rarely but feel like I "get the idea" ... but I also know that entire applications have been written in sed (a sokoban game, for one) so there's obviously more to know.… (more)