''The AWK Programming Language'' is a well-known 1988 book written by Alfred V. Aho,

Brian W. Kernighan Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-aut ...

, and

Peter J. Weinberger Peter Jay Weinberger (born August 6, 1942) is a computer scientist best known for his early work at Bell Labs. He now works at Google. Weinberger was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1964. He received his PhD in mathemati ...

and published by

Addison-Wesley Addison-Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson PLC, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison-Wesley also distributes its technical titles through ...

, often referred to as the gray book. The book describes the

AWK AWK (''awk'') is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. Like sed and grep, it is a filter, and is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems. The AWK lang ...

programming language and is the ''

de facto ''De facto'' ( ; , "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with ''de jure'' ("by la ...

'' standard for the language, written by its inventors. W. Richard Stevens, author of several UNIX books including '' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment'', cites the book as one of his favorite technical books. The book is translated to several languages and is cited by many technical papers in the ACM journals. According to the book's frontmatter the book was typeset "using an Autologic APS-5 phototypesetter and a DEC VAX 8550 running the 9th Edition of the UNIX operating system".

References

External links

The Awk Programming Language book review - IEEE
Computer books Computer_programming_books Addison-Wesley books {{compu-book-stub