The 'best' way to do something depends on what you need to do and why.
Shell commands often work by combining several programs together. Here we're using the "tail" program to chop off some lines before and the "head" program to chop off some lines after in order to only get the section we want.
awk would probably be its own entire book.
But you could do all that in one awk script without having to use several external programs, which may be faster in some cases (but not all cases). awk is a lot less flexible with files and redirection though, it's very task-specific. You often see a bit of a mix -- shell scripts which sometimes use short bits of awk for things awk makes really efficient or easy.
It would help to know what your system and shell is. You'll get different advice and books for Linux systems than HP-UX ones. They have a lot in common but are still quite different.