Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful
Review: Best book written on this subject!!! A must read. I can't
wait for the movie.
Rating: 
Summary: Very straigtforward instructions with good examples
Review: I found this book useful and entertaining
Rating: 
Summary: Easy. Organized. To the point.
Review: I grabbed this old edition from my co-worker and found it very well written. I am sure the new (2nd) edition is even better and up to date.
Rating: 
Summary: Good tutorial, problematic reference
Review: I suppose if the proof of the teaching is in the learning, the authors' idea (in this edition) of interlacing their discussions of Sed and Awk throughout the volume is vindicated, because I am learning easily from the book. Yet this organization detracts seriously from its reference value, especially when one uses the index. You can look up a feature which you need to review, turn to one of the listed pages, begin reading, and then realize that you have no idea which program is being described. While the approach is an interesting experiment, I question whether its benefits are worth such drawbacks. If the authors decide to continue the approach in later edition, a simple device such as different type faces of page references in the index (e.g. Roman for Awk, the more elaborate package, and Italic for Sed) would help relieve this problem.
Rating:
Summary: Great introduction, mediocre reference
Review: I was very interested in learning sed and awk, and so picked up this book. Like most O'Reilly titles, it is an excellent piece of work. I learned a great deal and was able to get started and pump out some useful code after spending some time with this book. However, I soon found that when it came to tackling some very difficult tasks with sed and awk, this book didn't seem to serve me very well as a reference. I have a feeling that sed and awk are not the sort of thing that one could learn with just one book; there are so many applications for these tools that one must choose what one wishes to do, and find the right books to supplement this excellent text.
Rating:
Summary: 2 cute little guys that will work hard for you
Review: I've had this book for 3-4 years now and find it to be mu handiest refernce. I even use ot more than my vi book. The raw power of sed and awk will humble even the proudest VB programmer and this book will help you get the most out of both the "Aho, Weinberg and Kernigan" and the "stream editor". The first chapter section is entitled "May You Solve Interesting Problems" a paraphrase of the old Chinese curse, but with sed and awk no problem seems insurmountable and wil make all problems appear interesting. This book is an outstanding reference and will get you up and running with both of these handy little programs in no time. Just to give you an example - the first time I ever used these programs (sed and awk) I developed a cron script to query a database every day at midnight, sort the results, grabbed lines with tagged values within certain limits, added a few totals, did some averaging, "starred" the lines that departed from certain parameters, then formatted the results into a report with a header showing the dates, times and query results, statistics then packed them into a report file and e-mailed them to a dozen recipients and added a few recipients if the data was outside certain values. I did this remarkable feat by copying a few examples from the book, changing a thing or two and in the end had a little shell script that was a few K-bytes at the most. This VB guy from corporate worked on a VB version of the same function and ended up with six revisions, several megs in the executable and never was able to get it formatted right. Not to say that it couldn't be done but..... I wrote mine before lunch one day. He worked on his for weeks and weeks. Such is the power contained within should you want to tap it Grasshopper. Great book. Amaze your friends and colleagues. Have the office women ( or men) throw flowers at your feet as you enter every day - well maybe not, but this will make you more productive. You real nerds will hardly get finished with a single box of Pop Tarts before you are writing really cool scripts when using this book. Like all O'Reilly books this one is terse, practical and highly usable - just like UNIX.
Rating:
Summary: A strong reference for sed and awk users
Review: It is a quality and authoritiative book. I first learned awk and sed with Ellen Quigleys 'Unix Shells' and found this book to assist with the more complex issues not covered in her book. (Like working with unstructured, dirty data, and defining a template to pull relevant data from the flat file. I didn't use this as a 'start at the beginning and read all the way through it,' like the 'Mastering Regular Expressions' book. This is more of a reference book.
Rating:
Summary: It is a greta book for sripts
Review: It is just too good. Orielly has one of the best books for Unix programming and other related tools
Rating:
Summary: Great book for beginners.
Review: Just finished it. Great book for beginners, tends to focus a bit on the non-programmer. However, it is revealing, showing you how to automatically edit things you usually do manually. Could have used some exercises, and some special problems at the end of each chapter, so you could practice what you learned in that chapter. Great book otherwise.
Rating:
Summary: Short, sweet, and to the point.
Review: Just like the rest of the O'Reilly line, it's just what you need if you've a basic clue about the subject but need the specifics.
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