Idiomatic awk | Hugonweb Annotated Link Bibliography

I've wanted to learn awk for a long time. I can't decide if it's too cryptic to learn and maintain or would be useful.

I have this idea of using old-fashioned text processing Unix tools for data analysis. Awk would be helpful, since it is a bit like sed but can do math (among other things).

Another resource is the second edition of the book The AWK Programming Language.