I use Perl one-liners for record and text processing a lot and this will be definitely something I will keep coming back to - I’ve already learned a trick from “Context Matching” (9) 🙂
I very much enjoyed Command line text processing with Coreutils. It helped me when I was writing my thesis, which basically consisted of several (quite long) pipelines. It would have been quite helpful if I’d known awk, so I’ll check this book out!
The web version looks very nice, but the PDF version feels a bit iffy (maybe a bit cheap?) to me — for example there are some bad pagebreaks (e.g. between pages 9 and 10 or pages 14 and 15). How do you create it? Perhaps you should get more hands-on with the typesetting. (I’m no expert on typography, but it would be a shame if your work was detracted from by the little imperfections that some people are sensitive to.)
Thanks a lot for the feedback on Coreutils book! It’s so nice to hear that it helped in your thesis.
Regarding the ebook versions, I use pandoc to convert GitHub style Markdown to PDF/EPUB (wrote a blog post about my process here: learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/). I had to search through stackexchange threads to customize the few things I could. I don’t know how to fix the kind of page breaks you mentioned. But, I’ll try to find a solution. Thanks again for the feedback :)
I can’t imagine writing a whole book in Markdown. I couldn’t live without the ability to create my own macros (like I can in TeX). But I digress. Those bad page breaks could perhaps be solved by using the nowidow (or any similar) package. If that doesn’t work, manually put https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/736 before the offending lines.
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