[sonnym]

I highly recommend The AWK Programming Language by Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger[1][2]. It has a very similar style to The C Programming Language, also co-written by Kernighan. Even as a general book on programming, it is pretty good in that it presents the reader with useful exercises from simple text processing all the way up to more advanced database implementations. I would not recommend it as a first programming book, but it really covers how powerful the AWK language is in a way that is very accessible.

1. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/ 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703101.The_awk_Programmi...

[hudibras]

The O'Reilly Sed & Awk book is a lot of fun, too.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565922259.do