Better place for learning than the man pages?
 

Once you have a general understanding of how a command works, the man pages on most of them are a great reference on how to get the most out of that command.
By all accounts, awk/gawk is an excellent tool, but all the man page is a little cryptic for a first time user who doesn't know the basic context yet.
Is there a better place to look if you want to learn the basics of how a given command works - especially it's syntax structure? Arrays, Patterns, Regular Expressions, Actions, Operators, Functions, etc. all look like great features, but they'll be a lot more useful once I learn how to put them together correctly.

For gawk in particular, what do all of the special characters like {} () [] + - = ! ^ / | \ , ; $ " ' ` etc. actually do? I can see that some things , like the various brackets & quotes, probably go together in sets, but where can I find a basic reference for which ones to use where and how they interact?


I hope that's not too broad of a request, but I'd appreciate any direction you might be able to offer - not just for gawk, but for other programs like PERL, BASH, FOR, WHILE, etc.

Thanks!

Google. Yes.

Absolutely. Google is your friend, and the web is it's playground.

I prefer to hit the man pages when I can, because I like conciseness. But even the man pages can get too harrowing at times.

There are soooo many tutorials on the Internet. You'll find them for little dinky things, and monster projects, too!

Just a couple of suggestions. The best reference for learning Gawk is the official manual (Gawk: effective AWK programming), very well written and with a lot of examples and test cases. For BASH you can learn a lot from The Advanced Bash Scripting Guide, available on the Linux Documentation Project (www.tldp.org) but better to start from some other basic reference available on the same site.

For Perl: http://perldoc.perl.org/ . Lang definition with examples, also tutorials (see upper left options).
There's a lot of good stuff here for Linux, inc bash etc http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

Thanks all!