[scbrg]

I blame GNU's man page. I was in the same situation for the longest time, but stumbled over a man page for a simpler implementation of awk (plan9's, in my case) and learned it in 10-15 minutes (not claiming I understood it more than partially in that time of course, but enough to write my own small programs).

Since then I've made a point of finding man-pages from other systems whenever the manual for a GNU tool is a bit daunting. It tends to lower the learning threshold quite a lot, honestly.

    $ man gawk | wc
       1568   13030   94207
    $ man -l /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1plan9.gz | wc 
        214    1579   10956

Not trying to detract from this great guide. Just a general tip :)

[guerrilla]

I tend to use cat-v since you can check really old versions which tend to be far simpler.

http://man.cat-v.org/unix_7th/1/awk