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bentley revised and updated some of his "programming pearls" columns and published them in 2 editions of books published circa 1986 and 2000. they are among my favorite computer science books, and a great companion to more theoretical data structures, algorithms, and software engineering texts. a great mix of theory, engineering, rules of thumb, insight, creativity etc., all presented lucidly. highly recommended!

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Yes, those two books are Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls. I have both, and they are good. In one of them there is a section or chapter with a few examples of advanced uses of awk, involving awk's associative arrays, to do some non-trivial work in very few lines of code[1]. He shows or says that the equivalent programs in C would be much longer and harder to write.

[1] Even more so than in most other common examples where awk programs are shorter than those in other languages.

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