[flukus]

> Does that mean that you have noone at the beginning of a CS degree that can't program yet? We certainly hat a good bunch of them.

I don't think our school was very typical, it was a fairly poor public school, I suspect it was taught because there was a sepecific teacher that wanted to teach it. It was being run from the commerce department at the time, with half the time spent in the graphic design class rooms (they only ones with computers). This was in the late 90's when they were still teaching us touch typing on electronic typewriters. It does seem like a huge waste for students to start a CS degree without experience though, a good portion of them will never have any aptitude for it.

> Do you have any preference for introduction material for awk?

I've been going through O'Reilly's "Sed & Awk" that was sold as part of a unix bundle a while ago. I haven't done much at all, though it has simplified monitoring things at work, like coloring log files reading from log files to tell us how many and how long a particular set of processes are taking.