Fun with awk

Recently I was wrangling with a few log files and sed and grep din't cut it and I had to use awk. I've always dreaded the use of awk as it was a programming language onto itself and hence I din't want to burden myself with learning another language that I rarely use. But, my latest interaction with awk left me satisfied and intrigued. Its almost like perl except that it follows a strict structure for just manipulating text and perl as I've learnt the hard way can be used to do anything (its been described as the duct tape that holds the internet together!!)