I used to be scared of Awk, and then I read through the appendix / chapters of "More Programming Pearls" (https://www.amazon.com/More-Programming-Pearls-Confessions-C...) and it became a much easier to reason about language.

The structure can be a bit confusing if you've only seen one liners because it has a lot of defaults that kick in when not specified.

The pleasant surprise from learning to use awk was that bpftrace suddenly became much more understandable and easier to write as well, because it's partially inspired by awk.

Jon Bentley [1] had a whole chapter in More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder [2], called Bumper-Sticker Computer Science, which was of this sort. There seems to be a copy of it online [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley

[2] http://www.amazon.com/More-Programming-Pearls-Confessions-Co...

[3] http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/bumper-sticker-computer-...