This is a difficult book to review and rate. I gave it a 4, but from another point of view, it deserves a 2. More on this later. If you look at the other reviews, they differ widely. But let's get on with the review shall we? I divide it into four sections. First an overview, then I consentrate on sed and awk. Finally I'll sum it all up.
Overview
This book start with introducing sed, gradually increasing difficulty. Then it go back to basics with awk. Awk is covered more in-depth than sed, becuse it is a bigger language. The appendices contain real-world examples of sed and awk programs, some of which I use today. It allso have a good refernce section, as it should.
This book generally focus on writings and typesetting, but extraction of information and report generating is allso covered. Overall I find that it cover most of my uses with these tools.
Sed
The sed-part begin nicely with a general intro to sed and regexps, and explain the difference between sed and ed. As I said earlier, it gradually increases in difficulty and usability. In the end you are able to advnced multiline search-and-replace, format touchups and much more.
Awk
As I said, Awk is covered more in-depth than sed. But allso this part begin with the basics, assuming no prior knowledge to awk. It do, however asume some knowledge with regexps, as that was covered in the sed section. It show you interaction with shell-scripts, as well as all the usual features in text manipulation. It is interesting to note that the authors have chosen to use 'old' awk as much as possible to ensure their examples will work on as many platforms as possible. They do, however poiont out when another awk, like nawk or gawk, can do the job more efficiently. They have allso used an entire chapter discussing the differences between the different awks. The last chapter discuss a rather large real-world example used when typesetting this book very in-depth. And in the appendices there are many useful awk-scripts.
Summary
All in all a good book. I particularly liked the awk section. The sed section was a bit terse for me in the beginning. But what can you expect, a young cub like me don't know how it was done in the good ol'days. The focus in this book is on typesetting. Not nesecerily bad, but my use of sed and awk is mainly report extraction and, to a lesser degree presentation.
As I said in the beginning, I might as well hve given this book a '2'. Here's why; This book focus on beginners to intermediate users. So their text and examples should reflect that. Their intermediate examples do, however, tend to be a bit too difficult if you skip on the first chapters, especially in the sed aprt. Again, not nesecerily bad, it might even be intentional from the authors; You can't move on until you have a firm grip on the basics. So if I was looking for a book to jump-start me into being an intermediate sed&awk programmer, I'd definately give this book a '2'.
I do recommend this book to anyone interested in a basic and thurough introduction to sed&awk. Mastering this book will let you do most things these languages were written to do
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