[adamgordonbell]

I found it hard to approach at first, but I think it was just the lack of material that worked through simple examples step by step.

I ended up writing my own guide to it, that in my unbiased opinion makes it easier to get the point where in-depth examples and language descriptions are easier to understand.

Edit: Oh, wow, it's even mentioned in this article. Maybe I should read before commenting.

https://earthly.dev/blog/jq-select/

[sfink]

I discovered jq after I wrote my own (extremely limited) version of it. I need it quite often, and yet I've never managed to get up the activation energy to learn enough for it to be useful. I need to have some notion of the computation model before anything is going to make sense to me. I hate learning things in completely disparate pieces that I need to memorize in hopes that someday it will just click together and I'll derive the underlying principles.

Your guide was great for this. It stepped me through enough of the bare basics in a way that the underlying model was obvious. It didn't get me nearly far enough for many of the tasks that I need jq for, but it got me started and that's all I really needed. Everything additional that I need to learn becomes obvious in retrospect—"of course there's an operator for this, there kind of has to be!".

Thank you!