Awk is one of those languages in which learning the syntax almost automatically teaches you to think differently. In Awk's case, in terms of tables, maintaining state between rows, and phases in execution while processing data. I find it as much as a mind f* as Lisp or Prolog, though in a very workaday unixy sort of way.
I feel there's often too much focus on the execution phases in introductory texts. I've done quite a bit of scripting in a proprietary derivative of AWK (primary difference: multidimensional arrays and structs) and I've never used the execution phases in any of those scripts. I really don't see them as an inherent, defining part of the language.
