[pjungwir]

I just finished reading Kernighan & Pike's The Unix Programming Environment this weekend, and it has a lot of awk. I read it more as a history book (it was published 40 years ago!), but the awk parts were a highlight, second only to the long penultimate chapter building your own calculator/programming language. It kind of made we want to learn more than just the basics I've been using for almost 25 years. But it also recalled Larry Wall's intro in Learning Perl, and how Perl started as a "better awk". That intro is really a direct response to K&P's book I think. So I don't know. I loved Perl in those days, and I agree about how not everything is doable as a shell pipeline. But a second edition makes me want to read it anyway. :-)