Effective awk Programming provides complete coverage of the gawk 3.1 language as well as the most up-to-date coverage of the POSIX standard for awk available anywhere. Author Arnold Robbins clearly distinguishes standard awk features from GNU awk (gawk)-specific features, shines light into many of the "dark corners" of the language, and devotes two full chapters to example programs. A brand new chapter is devoted to TCP/IP networking with gawk. As the official "User's Guide" for the GNU implementation of awk (gawk), it describes in an integrated fashion the extensions available to the System V Release 4 version of awk that are also available in gawk. The book is also available electronically, and can be freely copied and distributed under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's Free Documentation License (FDL). A portion of the proceeds from sales of this book will go to the Free Software Foundation to support further development of free and open source software.