Arnold Robbins

Definitely showing its age; the first third of the book exclusively discusses vi (not vim), to the extent that a lot of it becomes superceded by the rest of the book. The author has a serious hard-on for `troff`, one in three examples of how to do things with vi(m) is "how to format for troff", which doesn't help the relevancy issue.

Because I was reading on an ebook, the other egregious problem was a huge chunk of the book devoted to vile, kyle, elvis, and other weird vi-clones, none of show more which really seem to exist anymore. It's really hard to skim on an ebook, which is why I mention this.

BUT after you've got past all my nitpicking, the book is pretty good. If you're already an advanced vim-user, you probably won't get much out of it, but it's worth a skim to see if you're missing any fundamentals. I'd highly suggest the chapter on ex-commands, even if you don't look at the rest of book; I finished the book this morning and have already found a use for them.

I wanted to recommend this book, but honestly you'd probably do better just searching for vim blog posts. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I read this curious to see if I'd use either to replace Perl or Python in my workflow. SED I can definitely see using for quick one off edits. AWK, especially in light of the longer examples given later in this book, I don't see using. AWK is worth learning a bit about for its approach.

I used the 1997 second edition. Some of the examples are a bit dated. The prose is more readable than some by this publisher.

Quite an old book: 2009, Solaris had just been open sourced. Learned heaps from reading the bits that were relevant to me: bash, make and writing man pages.