The book looks good. I might pick it up. I think sed is one of those hidden power tools that everyone that works in the shell should pick up skills with. It's really helpful in some situations.
Nice. Finally motivated me to get the awk one as well. While you have mentioned doing a perl one next, I would also suggest considering something like "all the misc unix tools you never remember to use" (e.g. seq, col, cut, etc.) There is a bit of overlap among these tools to sed/awk/etc but this would probably lead to a nice "here is how you can do this in awk/sed, and here are the two args that make this command do the same job..."
I agree. I use sed, but it's not a part of my 'top of the head' workflow. I have a few things I use regularly on a cheat sheet. Usually when I need to do something new I have to struggle a bit. Same goes for awk, actually.
The intro has a very nice conceptual feel to it. I look forward to going through the book.
I can't think of material that is more appropriate for HN. Sed is one of the most popular text manipulation tools in the history of Unix. Peteris' ebooks are well authored, to the point, and wonderfully insightful.
I would have up voted without comment were it not for this post.
I don't know about the book, but the posts it is based on (usefully linked to from the linked article, http://www.catonmat.net/blog/sed-one-liners-explained-part-o... if anyone wants a more direct link) are certainly worth a scan so it probably got a good few votes for that. I might have to consider purchasing the book myself.
