Awk isn't really a web programming language. However, that's not to say you can't use it for that. The following link will take you to a good extensive reference for Awk programming: http://www.dc.turkuamk.fi/docs/gnu/awk/gawk_toc.html.

The AWK programming language is a Unix based programming language, and is sometimes considered as a pseudo-C interpreter. It is mainly used for sifting through and organizing large amounts of data at one time.

GAWK stands for GNU Awk. Awk is a programming language in the Linux world. Developed by Bell Laboratories in 1970. The name actually came from the names of the inventors.

AWK is a programming language developed in 1977 by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. It is was developed as a text-processing language - it has simple syntax to match lines of patterns, separate out the fields, and operate on them.

The awk programming/scripting language is used to pattern match text and then do something with the result. Using the -f option indicates that the awk program/script has been stored in an external file instead of being specified inline with the command.