Posted by a reviewer on Amazon

The content makes reference to mspcdos which given the year of publication is understandable nevertheless only a sadist uses anything other than nix inspired operating systems for serious data manipulation and query formulation

Posted by a reviewer on Amazon

Just to give you an example the first time i ever used these programs sed and awk i developed a cron script to query a database every day at midnight sort the results grabbed lines with tagged values within certain limits added a few totals did some averaging starred the lines that departed from certain parameters then formatted the results into a report with a header showing the dates times and query results statistics then packed them into a report file and emailed them to a dozen recipients and added a few recipients if the data was outside certain values

Posted by a reviewer on Amazon

This vb guy from corporate worked on a vb version of the same function and ended up with six revisions several megs in the executable and never was able to get it formatted right

Posted by a reviewer on Amazon

You real nerds will hardly get finished with a single box of pop tarts before you are writing really cool scripts when using this book

Posted by a reviewer on Amazon

Sed is a direct descendent of ed the original unix line editor which employs regular expressions a powerful method for description of patterns in text for operations like substitute append or delete

Posted by a reviewer on Amazon

However it remains a mystery to me how they succeeded to fill no less than 407 pages with it

Posted by a reviewer on Amazon

In conclusion go buy the book if your need to manipulate text files on unix and you think you need a lengthy tutorial with a gentle learning curve

Posted by a reviewer on Amazon

There are many many situations where an awksedsh pipe has a small fraction of the code size of any other way of solving the problem