It turns out Awk is pretty simple. It has only a couple of conventions and only a small amount of syntax. As a result, its straightforward to learn, and once you understand it, it will come in handy more often than youd think.

Source: Understanding AWK - Earthly Blog

I didn’t really learn much by reading this. It was more of a refresher. AWK still isn’t a part of my tool belt as I tend to reach for Ruby first, but I might be inspired to look for more reasons to use it. My experience this far in my life is that I’ll run into a wall, realize I know how to do it in Ruby, and just switch to that, but the author has a point about AWK being universal. (No silly Ruby environment problems to deal with.)