Final comment
(on this subject...).
I am not aware of any awk-specific mailing lists or help sites, but then, I have never had need of one myself, so I haven't done extensive searching.
However, if you choose Perl and/or Python, consider the following.
Although this partial/simple book list is O'Reilly-centric, O'Reilly cornered the market when it comes to Perl titles. Other good non-O'Reilly titles exist, but when starting out with the language, staying with the animal books is a reasonable choice.
As for Python, O'Reilly has some good titles, but they did not capture the Python book market as they did with Perl. Python came out after Perl, & the industry was at a different point in its maturation. These may be contributing factors as to the difference.