Overview
A quick, friendly, hands-on tutorial on UNIX programming with awk, sed and grep -- -- with exclusive access to an up-to-the-minute Web-based training site! Learn step-by-step how to solve practical problems with awk, sed and grep.Begin with a hands-on introduction to regular expressions and grep. Through interactive Labs, learn the fundamentals of sed, including addressing, commands, scripting and more. Walk step-by-step through the Awk language, writing simple programs, understanding data types, statements, expressions, patterns, actions, functions, arrays and I/O. Finally, put it all together with the Awk utility, learning techniques For printing, computation, text processing and more. The accompanying Web site includes a Virtual Study Lounge where you can meet authors and other users; interactive testing modules that offer instant feedback; bonus projects and solutions; updates, new info, feedback areas and more. All UNIX power user sysadmins and beginning programmers who want to learn awk, sed and grep.
- Interactive labs introduce regular expressions, Grep, sed commands, scripting and more.
- Practical coverage of the Awk language, data types, statements, expressions, control flow, I/O and the Awk utility.
- Web-enabled with its own UNIX awk and sed Programmer's Training Web site -- exclusively for the buyers of this book!
Editorials
Jack Woehr
UNIX awk and sed Programmer's Interactive Workbook, by Peter Patsis is intended to teach the essentials of the classic UNIX text filters awk, grep, and sed in a novel fashion. While the approach has value, the author, editors (Mark L. Taub and Ralph Moore), and publisher should have focused more closely on the meat-and-potatoes of their endeavor, which is accurate, readable technical writing.
UNIX awk and sed Programmer's Interactive Workbook is one of the UNIX Interactive Workbooks for which the Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference series maintain their tutorial web site at. The idea is that users read the book and receive supplementary reinforcement via the provided web material associated with the specific volume in the series.
I was unable to evaluate the web material relevant to UNIX awk and sed Programmer's Interactive Workbook because it is not yet available at the time this review was written. However, the material for a companion volume, UNIX System Administrator's Interactive Workbook, by Joe Kaplenk, is available and consists of several chapters of information and quizzes in the style of that book, expanding upon the material contained in the print volume, along with updates, corrections, and an author's corner. Users of the interactive web site have an updatable profile that allows them to customize their interaction, and incidentally provides Prentice Hall with a bit of marketing information.
UNIX awk and sed Programmer's Interactive Workbook is a spoonfeeding book, aimed at providing you the basics of the subject under a discussion chopped into easy gulps. This is a laudable goal in view of the number of individuals who have contact with legacy UNIX applications. There still is an immense amount of awk, sed, and grep code embedded in institutional suites (banking and home title insurance, for instance), and there will be jobs to maintain this code for the foreseeable future, just as there are jobs maintaining the RPG code running on bigger iron.
To the experienced eye, Patsis clearly possesses the ability to teach his subject. However, the team behind this book have defaulted on their responsibility. Typographical errors abound in this book, errors that will generate confusion should the user follow the given instructions. We should not have to remind one of the world's largest technical publishing houses that UNIX command-line exercises that use the back-tick-apostrophe pair ( `text' ) when they mean two single quotes ('text') have long been unacceptable. It's unacceptable in variable-width fonts, where typesetting defeats technology; it's unbelievable in 1999 to see this gloss in fixed-width font in this $35.00, 600-plus-page Prentice Hall book.
While the information the author intends to convey is valuable, the audience -- explicitly the beginner or intermediate UNIX user -- will have trouble digesting it due to the poor presentation. I would encourage the publisher to consider another editing and typesetting pass on this well-targeted book to ensure its favorable reception in the market.
— Electronic Review of Books