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Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition | 
 enlarge | Authors: Debra Cameron, James Elliott, Marc Loy, Eric Raymond, Bill Rosenblatt
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $22.84
You Save: $17.11 (43%)
New (28) Used (11) from $22.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 56103
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 534
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0596006489
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.13
EAN: 9780596006488
ASIN: 0596006489
Publication Date: December 13, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: All orders ship same business day via standard shipping (USPS Media Mail) if received by 1 PM CST.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
GNU Emacs is the most popular and widespread of the Emacs family of editors. It is also the most powerful and flexible. Unlike all other text editors, GNU Emacs is a complete working environment--you can stay within Emacs all day without leaving. Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition tells readers how to get started with the GNU Emacs editor. It is a thorough guide that will also "grow" with you: as you become more proficient, this book will help you learn how to use Emacs more effectively. It takes you from basic Emacs usage (simple text editing) to moderately complicated customization and programming. The third edition of Learning GNU Emacs describes Emacs 21.3 from the ground up, including new user interface features such as an icon-based toolbar and an interactive interface to Emacs customization. A new chapter details how to install and run Emacs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, including tips for using Emacs effectively on those platforms. Learning GNU Emacs, third edition, covers: - How to edit files with Emacs
- Using the operating system shell through Emacs
- How to use multiple buffers, windows, and frames
- Customizing Emacs interactively and through startup files
- Writing macros to circumvent repetitious tasks
- Emacs as a programming environment for Java, C++, and Perl, among others
- Using Emacs as an integrated development environment (IDE)
- Integrating Emacs with CVS, Subversion and other change control systems for projects with multiple developers
- Writing HTML, XHTML, and XML with Emacs
- The basics of Emacs Lisp
The book is aimed at new Emacs users, whether or not they are programmers. Also useful for readers switching from other Emacs implementations to GNU Emacs.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Add to Your Private Collection of Emacs Documentation May 16, 2008
Emacs comes with great documentation, and there is a ton of it on the web. Nevertheless a structured book that is well-designed with great illustrations and examples is priceless. Despite my level of skill with Emacs (I "live in Emacs," using it for all my basic computing tasks), I consult this book regularly. It's a regular part of my Emacs library!
This book covers more than just using the editor: building Emacs from source, the help system, and Emacs Lisp are covered as well. This book is always telling me about things that I didn't know Emacs could do.
Although I have read a few chapters from front-to-back, I mainly use this book as a reference.
The road less traveled November 29, 2007
It seemed odd to me during my Sophomore year at Penn State that the Computer Science Department wanted me to learn a text editor to do computer programming on UNIX computers. In the business classes students were taught to use an IDE on Windows computers. I remember asking myself why would I be one of the few to learn how to use a text editor to do computer programming when the masses where learning to use a GUI approach. I made up my mind that the computer scientists probably knew more about programming than the business professors, and taking the road less traveled has made all the difference.
While I am no where near a Emacs expert this book has made me into more than just a casual user. Learning how to do the keyboard macros has saved me countless hours of work over the years. Sometimes if I plan on doing a lot of typing for a business document I'll use emacs to get started so I don't have to lift my fingers off the keys, then paste the text into word for formatting.
Using this book to expand my previous knowledge of Emacs has had exponential return on investment. I highly recommend it, to anyone that is trying to learn or wants to improve their emacs skill level.
 Doesn't cover everything, but I've been using Emacs for 3 years and learned a lot here February 3, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
LEARNING GNU EMACS is an introduction to the most powerful text editor ever made, a fully-programmable environment that through contributions from thousands has become something of an operating system in itself. This third edition covers all the new enhancements made in version 21.3.
The book begins with an introduction to Emacs as it : a text editor. It gives basic commands for moving around, describes the look of the user interface, teaches how to search and replace, and how to make simple (and not-so-simple) macros. But Emacs isn't just a simple text editor, it also has extensions to do everything from drawing simple pictures to managing your schedule. In the next portion the book describes among other things Dired, the Emacs file manager, the calendar and diary functions, and how to execute commands from within Emacs.
Since Emacs functions as an integrated-development environment for many programming languages, a fairly large portion of the book focus on how Emacs can help the software developer. Concerning markup languages, this new edition covers the excellent nxml mode for XML documents, and in terms of computer languages it describes modes for C, C++, Java, Perl, SQL, and Lisp. Unfortunately, the Python mode is not discussed. An entire chapter is devoted to Emacs' interface to version control systems like CVS.
The book doesn't aim itself at only a beginner's market. It teaches one already proficient in editing to customize Emacs. At the simplest, this means tinkering with one's "~/.emacs" file, but it also includes using the power of Lisp to change all aspects of Emacs.
This book could only be perfect if it were twice as large as it is now, since Emacs has so much in it. I think it a pity that the book doesn't cover Gnus, a mail and news reader that takes advantage of Emacs' scriptable nature to offer immense configurability and power. In fact, it doesn't cover the popular Mew mail reader or Emacs' limited built-in mail reader at all. Also, the bit on search and replace doesn't give any small intro to regular expressions.
Emacs is not for everyone, and even with a fine book like this some people are not going to like it. But if you are comfortable doing basic editing with Emacs, and want to maximize your efficiency, then LEARNING GNU EMACS can help.
Respects the intellect of one motivated enough to learn Emacs and enables mastery of the tool September 15, 2005
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
If a person is thinking of learning GNU Emacs, or if they have been using it and are looking to sharpen their skills and broaden their Emacs savvy, it is a fairly safe assumption that the individual is motivated. This person probably knows their way around a command prompt, and it is likely that they are aware that Lisp is more than just a speech impediment. This person needs a book that offers expert advice without wasting time or insulting the intellect of the reader. Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition is that book.
As a programmer, when firing up a monolithic word processor or graphical IDE to edit a simple script or properties file, one cannot help but wonder if these tools aren't overkill much of the time. For a growing number of users, the answer is yes. The tried-and-true text editor is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. One of the most extensible and customizable applications in the text editing category is the venerable GNU Emacs.
The tutorials and documentation for Emacs are abundant, but they often prove time-consuming and ineffective for actually learning Emacs. This book is a refreshing break from the documentation many have come to expect. Imagine you had a consortium of leading experts on Emacs at your disposal to teach you how to use it in a conversational, consultative style. That is what has been bundled into this latest edition of the book.
The extensibility of Emacs has been both a key strength and a criticism of the application. Its user and developer community have created all sorts of additional capabilities for Emacs, ranging from the impressive to the absurd. The authors have done well to judiciously select what to cover in this edition. For example, while Emacs does have the capability to function as an email client, other applications have long superceded its ability. The authors have chosen not to cover this topic, and instead devote the available space to learning Emacs' core functionality - powerful, efficient text editing. Other peripheral areas of Emacs have been left for the user to research after gaining their solid foundation on Emacs as editor and work environment, such as compatibility modes for programming languages other than Java and Perl.
This edition of the book uses the space gained by the removal of esoteric topics to flesh out areas of more common interest. Integration with the major version control systems has been expanded to include Subversion alongside of the age-old standards CVS, RCS, and SCCS. Coverage of support for Java and Perl has also improved, as well as sections for editing HTML and XML. Users wanting to tap into the power of Lisp programming for Emacs should find the coverage satisfying as well.
Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of this book is the chapter devoted to the use of Emacs on different platforms. Unix, Windows and Mac OS X users receive equal acknowledgement. The precautions and insights regarding Emacs nuances when used on particular platforms can reduce users' frustration when getting started with Emacs.
Even current Emacs users can benefit from this work. The mnemonic devices and conventions used in the book allow users to commit useful keyboard commands to memory. The memorization is further solidified by the exercises sprinkled appropriately through each chapter. Readers do not go for very many pages before it is time to be at the keyboard again, harnessing the power of muscle memory to reinforce the material presented.
A Professional Book for Professional Programmers March 19, 2005
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
Most of the Unix/Linux senior level Wizzards that I know use Emacs and swear by it. There are others (vi users especially) who swear at it, but that's another story. Emacs is a huge package and is growing bigger. Although you can consider it a text editor, it's a big, massive package that does a lot more than just edit text.
At the start of the book the authors comment "Many people think that Emacs is an extremely difficult editor to learn. We don't see why." I think the WHY is that most people start with a simpler more fundamental text editor like vi. Then when they think of moving to Emacs their fingers have to un-learn the vi commands to replace them with the Emacs commands. The authors say they don't recommend the vi emulation mode built into Emacs, but fingers sometimes take a long time to un-learn.
If you've just decided to move to Linux, you might want to start with Emacs and never go the vi route. There is no question that Emacs has more power. Comparing to the Microsoft world, I think of vi like NotePad, while Emacs is like Word.
There's an interesting table near the front of the book that asks you what you want to do with Emacs. If you want to write HTML, read Preface and Chapters 1-3 & 8. Then after you are getting some work out of the package, you can go to other chapters as you need them - Chapter 12, for instance to use Emacs to compare files.
About half the book is on 'simple' text editing, where their 'simple' maybe isn't as 'simple' as the rest of us consider 'simple.' I do a lot of SQL, Chapter 9 talks about the editing support for SQL, and for other programming environments like Perl, Lisp, JDEE, etc.
This book is from O'Reilly. O'Reilly does professional quality books for professional programmers. If it's time to learn Emacs, you can't do better than this.
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