From the thoughtbot blog:
sed is a useful tool that reformats and transforms plain text. But sed is not a good match for structured data like JSON. jq is a sed-like tool that is specifically built to deal with JSON.
I can’t believe it took me two months to read this blog post and so long to learn about such incredible tool. I deal with JSON everyday, and I had a hard time extracting data from it, but not anymore. Seriously, this thing is awesome.