Effective awk Programming,3rd Edition, focuses entirely on
awk, exploring it in the greatest depth of the three
awk titles we carry. It's an excellent companion piece to the more broadly focused second edition.
This book provides complete coverage of the
gawk 3.1 language as well as the most up-to-date coverage of the POSIX standard for
awk available anywhere. Author Arnold Robbins clearly distinguishes standard
awk features from GNU
awk
(gawk)-specific features, shines light into many of the "dark corners" of the language (areas to watch out for when programming), and devotes two full chapters to example programs. A brand new chapter is devoted to TCP/IP networking with gawk. He includes a summary of how the
awk language evolved.
The book also covers:
- Internationalization of gawk
- Interfacing to i18n at the awk level
- Two-way pipes
- TCP/IP networking via the two-way pipe interface
- The new PROCINFO array, which provides information about running gawk
- Profiling and pretty-printing awk programs
In addition to covering the
awk language, this book serves as the official "User's Guide" for the GNU implementation of
awk (
gawk), describing in an integrated fashion the extensions available to the System V Release 4 version of
awk that are also available in
gawk.
As the official
gawk User's Guide, this book will also be available electronically, and can be freely copied and distributed under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's Free Documentation License (FDL). A portion of the proceeds from sales of this book will go to the Free Software Foundation to support further development of free and open source software.
The third edition of
Effective awk Programming is a GNU Manual and is published by O'Reilly & Associates under the
Free Software Foundation's Free Documentation License (FDL). A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book is donated to the Free Software Foundation to further development of GNU software. This book is also available in electronic form; you have the freedom to modify this GNU Manual, like GNU software. Copies published by the Free Software Foundation raise funds for GNU development.
Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He has worked with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. He has been a heavy AWK user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project's version of AWK. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for AWK. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation. He is also coauthor of the sixth edition of O'Reilly's Learning the vi Editor. Since late 1997, he and his family have been living happily in Israel.
