On learning to use geeky tools to boost productivity, or "May you solve interesting problems"

Under the heading "May you Solve Interesting problems"
"The primary motivation for learning sed and awk [two geeky text-editing tools] is that they are useful for devising general solutions to text editing problems. For some people, myself included, the satisfaction of solving a problem is the difference between work and drudgery. Given the choice of using vi [a normal text editing program] or sed to make a series of repeated edits over a number of files, I will choose sed, simply because it makes the problem more interesting to me. I am finding a solution instead of repeating a series of keystrokes. Besides, once I accomplish my task, I congratulate myself on being clever. I feel like I have done a little bit of magic and spared myself some dull labor."

Dale Dougherty, sed & awk page 2, No Starch Press.

Book: Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

Wicked Cool Shell Scripts from No Starch Press looks like it has some handy shell tools for improving productivity, like

An interactive spell-checker
Fixing grep
Downloading Files via FTP
Extracting URLS from a web page
Defining Words Online

New Book: Parallel R

O'Reilly has just released Parallel R. Its only 100 pages -- kinda slim -- and so its coverage might be thin. That's longer than the 20 pages on parallel computing in Matloff's The Art of R Programming (No Starch Press 2011), the only other book with parallel R info I've bumped in to.

The book does cover a wide arrange of parallel computing packages and options, though:
Snow,
Multicore,
Parallel,
R+Hadoop,
RHIPE,
and Segue.