On the tools to learn

Article:		Top Ten Data Crunching Tips and Tricks
Subject:		On the tools to learn
Date:		2005-08-09 00:04:12
From:		Paddy3118

I do most of my datatransformation/crunching work on Unix. I do beleive you should learn the tools available but I would change the list: I have not found much use for cut over the years Because I'm that old, I first learned AWK and still use it extensively, even though I also know perl. If your writting out data then try and write it in a way suitable for an AWK program to read it. I've always found that AWK-able data formats are easy to parse in perl, python, tcl, bash, and C. (This assumes that you can set the data output format. A bit of context: I'm in the Electronic Design Automation field, where a lot of tools come with in-built tcl interpreters, data is often in indented lisp-like lists, AWK-able tables, and machine generated programming code in Verilog or VHDL. - Paddy.