BKSEDAWK.RVW   970706

"sed & awk", Dale Dougherty/Arnold Robbins, 1997, 1-56592-255-5,
U$24.95/C$42.95
%A   Dale Dougherty
%A   Arnold Robbins
%C   103 Morris Street, Suite A, Sebastopol, CA   95472
%D   1997
%G   1-56592-255-5
%I   O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
%O   U$24.95/C$42.95 800-998-9938 707-829-0515 fax: 707-829-0104 nuts@ora.com
%P   432
%S   UNIX Power Tools
%T   "sed & awk, 2nd ed."

The Enlightened Ones say that you should never use C if you can do it with a
script, never use a script if you can do it with awk, never use awk if you can
do it with sed, and never use sed if you can do it with grep.  Why?

What's the next Big Technology that corporates really "gotta have"?  No, I'm
sorry, firewalls are passe and extranets are really nothing new.  The big thing
is data warehousing.  And if you manage to put together a data warehouse? 
Then, you have to have data mining.  This, you can do with grep.  (Grep
actually gets little space in the book, but it is a good introduction to sed
and awk.)

So what's the Big Problem these days?  Easy answer.  Year 2000, that's right. 
Which means you have to take all your two-digit-year data fields, and make them
four-digit-year data fields.  You can do that with sed.  True, you still have
to check and modify all your programming, but sed could help you there, too. 
(And, if you were using the proper tools, you wouldn't have two million lines
of code to go through.)

And what have the Big Software Companies been telling you to buy for the last
fifteen to twenty years?  Fourth generation languages.  For all the arguing
over them, what are 4GLs?  Report writers.  They read data, find appropriate
data, and format it in a way that doesn't strain our carbon-based logic units. 
Sounds a lot like awk.

So, this book will tell you how to handle the latest Big Technology, Big
Problem, and Big Software.

(Now, aren't you sorry you don't use UNIX?)

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1997   BKSEDAWK.RVW   970706