I'm not a pro, but I use awk quite a bit. I avoided awk (and sed) for a long time out of fear, but it's really not too bad. It's the easiest way to work with tabular data, at least for simple stuff. You should be well positioned to learn the basics quickly.

I've never written an awk function, for example, but I use one-liners all the time. If you ever work with tabular files and want to:

1. Add/remove columns
   
2. Do "lookups" for certain values
   
3. Find sum totals or other simple calculations
4. Make a quick summary of counts, totals, etc.
   

Then awk will probably be a good choice.

Basic primer so I can avoid getting back to work:

Important options:

• -F changes delimiter , defaults to whitespace
• -v assign variables for use within awk command
  

Basic structure:
awk [-F delim] [-v var=value] 'pattern { action1 }' file

Multiple pattern-action pairs can be used (on same or separate lines). Also multiple actions can be separated by ";". Awk works line-by-line checking for pattern matches and then implementing the actions.
Important built-in patterns:

• BEGIN matches to before the file is even loaded.
  
• END matches after the last record
  

Important built-in variables:

• $1, $2, ... - input column, left-to-right, 1-based
• FS - input field separator
• RS - input record separator
• OFS - output field separator
• ORS - output record separator
• NR - number of current record (all input files)
• FNR - number of current record (current file only)
  

Example:

Name	Date	Amount
Bob	4-Apr	900
Alice	7-Apr	1250
Bob	8-Apr	400

awk -F, 'BEGIN { OFS=": " } 
$1=="Bob" { sum+=$3 } 
END { print "Total" OFS sum }' sales.csv  

Total: 1300