Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

My very first job getting paid to write software was writing in scripts in Awk to parse and analyze some software log files, for a faculty software researcher, in, maybe, 1997? i didn't know Awk before, it's just what I inherited. Spent a few hours with the O'Reilly book, and I was like, okay, sure, let's go.

As the stuff we were doing in that project got more complex, at some point someone suggested to teenage me "You might want to look at Perl for this now," and then I moved to that. (with the Camel O'Reilly book, of course!)

Haven't touched either one in years now.

Learning new things can be much more overwhelming for me now, I don't know how much is me vs environment. But I am nostalgic for those days where I'd sit down with a print book, and within hours have a grasp of the fundamentals, or within days feel like I had basic fundamental conceptual understanding of the whole dang thing (not of every possible feature, but of the conceptual framework, the big picture).

I read a different book, written by the creators of AWK themselves. But the experience was much the same. You can read it in one sitting.

Or, rather, you can read the two first chapter easily in one sitting. Chapter one gives a brief overview and examples. Chapter two describes the whole language, every function and every variable! The rest of the book is just more examples. I really love this style!

If I write more than about 50 bytes of awk I inevitably end up using perl instead because it's much more powerful. One example was I wanted to convert a column in format a|b|c to ['a', 'b', 'c']. Doing that in awk is painful. In Perl, there's join and map, takes a few seconds.

Yes, my impression is there are less such books written nowadays that explain the conceptual fundamentals, unfortunately.

One of the reason is that the frameworks that the book'd use are changing completely every 6-12 months. If you write a book that uses k8s, after 12-24 months, the examples you use might not even run.

Whereas if I pick up an Awk book that OP referred, it's likely I could still use it to learn, you can't really do the same with most of modern tech stack.

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