What is your favorite electronics or software book?

David Tansley Linux & Unix Shell Programming First Published 2000.

A dog-eared compendium of command line tools that I still use to this day. The book not only provides the commands but extensive examples of how they can be applied. The book has given me so much such success, I would rather use it first before doing a Google search.

I sed, awk and regex'd my way through normalising and correcting a twenty seven year old telephone database system with 650K records that had few constraints or data validation parameters. The system was do to be ungraded. On a first pass of transferring data between the old and new system 65K records error'd out. That number had to be reduced to less than 1/2 of 1% before cut-over.

I constructed many small oracle databases on a Linux platform in my home basement and imported tables of text file data from the system. Between SQL and shell commands and the advice of an experienced telephone person that knew the data, the data-set was slow amended. Small uploads of record correction were applied to the original system, using the systems native tools. This was long before the pretty GUI tools that exists today. Two weeks of basement dwelling and command line crawling resulted in less than 200 record errors at cutover. The total project took six months.

Why I never recall that experience as a response to question "Please provide an example of how needed to use your own initiative to come up with a solution to a problem? " is beyond me. Thanks for the question DW. You gave me reason to smile.

Oh awk, how well I remember thee.  I was working for a company that developed financial software for grocery stores.  We were doing a conversion on data from the prior system to ours and the responsibility of the data migration fell on me.  I wrote a huge awk script to do the conversion.  I was able to convert all of the active records (over 500K) including recovery of all of the pin codes (that were stored encrypted).  I was actually able to script out the decryption and encryption routines in awk! (after retrieving the master keys from the prior encryption system).  Through the years, whenever I need to script a solution I go back to awk (now using ported versions to windows).

AWKmazing:) Not much data is in raw text anymore so manipulating data in that form is few and far between. I still use it to parse and edit human readable files. I usually have to break out the book to do it now. Command syntax not on my finger tips as in times gone past.

AWKmazing:) Not much data is in raw text anymore so manipulating data in that form is few and far between. I still use it to parse and edit human readable files. I usually have to break out the book to do it now. Command syntax not on my finger tips as in times gone past.