The AWK programming language
The AWK Programming Language is a well-known 1988 book written by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger and published by Addison-Wesley, often referred to as the gray book. The book describes the AWK programming language and is the de facto standard for the language, written by its inventors. W. Richard Stevens, author of several UNIX books including Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, cites the book as one of his favorite technical books. The book is translated to several languages and is cited by many technical papers in the ACM journals.
Stats for nerds
61recommend
117mentions
79people
2009–2026years
77% recommend23% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Everyone should read "The AWK Programming Language". It's so short, with both the first and second editions floating around 200 pages in an A5 (could be off on that page size) form factor.
Aside from AWK being a handy language to know, understanding the ideas behind it from a language design and use case perspective can help open your eyes to new constructs and ideas.
- I have only dabbled in AWK, but I love the book "The AWK Programming Language" by its authors. Its a great read for any programmer, highlighting pragmatic techniques to solve real-world problems.
- Some of my favorites that have stayed at least pretty relevant. Disclosure: not an old timer.
- UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook. Get the most recently volume. It's a tomb (~1200 for the most recent).
- If you do any SQL, SQY Performance Explained is an 80/20 read for DB indexes, query optimization, and troubleshooting
- A Philosophy of Software Design (more recent). Just a great book on good design considerations to keep in mind.
- Mastering Regular Expressions. The first half of the book will make you confident. The second half will show you how they're implemented. Regular expressions aren't something to be afraid of!
- Designing Data Intensive Applications (more recent). Great book about data infra design decisions. Maybe not the scope you're looking for though.
- Design Patterns (Gang of Four). Absolute classic. Hard to read all the way through though, more of a reference read. You'll recognize a lot of the patterns. You'll find some great to see a formal definition of, and you'll see some you never want to use.
- Clean Architecture - Uncle Bob's best book IMO. I really don't like Clean Code, but this book talks a lot about interfaces and the right level of separation in your systems.
- K&R, as you mentioned, is of course a classic
- The AWK Programming Language is a nice quick read with similar quality and structure to K&R.
- Beej's Guide to Network Programming. The best overview of network programming, including the C API. Plus this book is genuinely funny. Beej has a ton of great stuff, all on their website for free, or in print.
- The Rust Programming Language is very well written too. Also online for free or in print.
- The Awk Programming Language[0], while obviously much longer than the linked guide, is such a joy to read. One of the more interesting examples is the creation of a simple virtual machine in AWK.
0 - https://awk.dev/
- The small AWK book "The AWK Programming Language" was a great resource on many things :)
- Sharing the love for awk as well :)
Aho's second edition of The AWK Programming Language dropped a few months ago is recommended if you want to know more about the language.
Related
The C Programming Language
246 recommend · 604
The UNIX programming environment
86 recommend · 215
Advanced programming in the Unix environment
100 recommend · 153
Effective awk Programming
3 recommend · 7
Compilers, principles, techniques, and tools
195 recommend · 958
The Practice of Programming
90 recommend · 184
