Olivier Langlois's blog

I had to do some text processing and I wanted to learn sed & awk so I picked this book that is, to my knowledge, the only book completely dedicated to these tools. The chapter on 'advanced' sed programming is very scary because when using 'advanced' sed features, the syntax is cryptic. It is nice to know that these features are there but I want to stay away from them and perhaps use awk or perl for the tasks that would require those 'advanced' features. Still, when you stick with the 'basic' and 'intermediate' sed features, you can do cool things easily in shell scripts.

Overall, the book was not thrilling to read but it does a good job to teach you these text processing tools.

By having read the 3 books in the serie, I must say that this is my favorite because it has really answered a lot of small questions I had for a long time about several aspects of C++.

The only thing that I have disliked is that Mr. Sutter has contradicted himself with one of the advice that he was giving in the first book. The advice was to not write an assignment operator in terms of its copy constructor with the in place new operator and the explicit destructor and I did agree with the reasoning. Now in this book, it is written that is ok to use that idiom if and if and if and he goes for about a paragraph to describe the condition where it is ok to use the pattern. I can imagine that the author had to admit that there might be exceptional situation where it is ok to use that technique in a heated debate but my opinion is that out of context, he should not have mention that it might be ok to use that technique without devoting an entire item on that topic. It did just confuse me and I had to reread the item in the first book to convince me that there was effectively a contradiction between the 2 books and that it was not just my memory playing games with me.