All you need to do is learn that cmd | awk '{ $5 }' will print out the 5th word as delimited by one or more whitespace characters. Regexes support this easily but are cumbersome to write on the command line.
Doing that, maybe with some inline concatenation to make a new structure, and this are about all I use:
Printing based on another field, example gets UIDs >= 1000:
awk -F: '$3 >= 1000 {print $0}' /etc/passwd
It can do plenty of magic, but knowing how to pull fields, concat them together, and select based on them cover like 99% of the things I hope to do with it
