I advise not learning more than basic usage of awk and to spend the time on more versatile languages. You can do very neat tricks with sed and awk, but when the problems become more complex, it is a lot faster to use a smarter language. And if you know well this language, you will discover that it may also be very concise for relatively simpler tasks.

When Perl was created, one of its advertised goal was to avoid all the time lost trying to work around the limitations of awk, sed and shell.