I just finished reading Kernighan & Pike's The Unix Programming Environment this weekend, and it has a lot of awk. I read it more as a history book (it was published 40 years ago!), but the awk parts were a highlight, second only to the long penultimate chapter building your own calculator/programming language. It kind of made we want to learn more than just the basics I've been using for almost 25 years. But it also recalled Larry Wall's intro in Learning Perl, and how Perl started as a "better awk". That intro is really a direct response to K&P's book I think. So I don't know. I loved Perl in those days, and I agree about how not everything is doable as a shell pipeline. But a second edition makes me want to read it anyway. :-)

It was in October or November, I think. The book doesn't add much to the first edition, I was quite deceived.

It's a second edition, not a new book -- why did you feel deceived? There's a fair bit of restructuring of the first few chapters, and a whole new chapter on exploratory data analysis (which uses the new CSV support) and a bunch of new stuff about the new Unicode-character support.

Then certainly that my expectations were too high from what I'd read in the reviews, I was expecting a lot of changes like the second edition of the dragon book. You can see that some programs were obviously written to get around the memory limitations of the computers of the time, such as the assembler and emulator for an imaginary machine.

2nd Edition != Volume 2