[juiceandjuice]

Are you prolific or at least very capable at using grep, sed, awk, tr, sort, uniq, cut, wc, and cat?

I don't think you need to read a book about shell scripting, but I think if you are familiar with these tools, there's a whole lot of things you can do with pipes. If you are opposed to learning them (and regular expressions), then there's no language that will ever please you.

Most importantly, except for some caveats, these languages are portable and preinstalled on most everything posix.

[mohamedsa]

The problem with casual programming is that problems of a given type (say parsing some files) arise from time to time; so unless its part of your day job, investing in learning those tools doesn't seem so worthwhile until the same type of problem arises weeks later.

IMO a truly casual programming tool is about the quickest route from "need" to "working code".