[mmcgaha]

I always tell people the best way to learn how to use linux is to read The Unix Programming Environment.

[anthk]

Perl superseded it for almost all of the chapters, except for the C ones. Altough for small programs, for sure it did.

Perl used to have an AWK to Perl converter because most of the language could be mapped 1:1 to Perl.

UPE would be fine under 9front save for sh (rc) and make (mk).

[buescher]

I liked awk and perl was even better where either more structured (I know, I know) constructs were comfy or I needed perl dbi (which was awesome, what do people use now?) but that was a while ago. Sort of nuts that awk is much faster on really big columnar (csv etc) data, though.

[cafard]

>> what do people use now?

Well, sometimes Perl DBI. But the young seem to learn Python about the time they get their drivers' licenses, and some unfortunate among them will inherit my code, so these days I use more psycopg or cx_Oracle (the latter now superseded, yes).