GNU Emacs Manual, For Version 21, 15th Edition

Rating:
Summary: Creaming in my Jeans!!!
Review: I bought a copy of Emacs version 18 a very long time ago and loved it. The tutorial built into Emacs is very usefull from a practice standpoint, but the hardcopy does help to clear up a lot of the advanced features. Sensational!...Ingenius!!!

Rating:
Summary: Creaming in my Jeans!!!
Review: I bought a copy of Emacs version 18 a very long time ago and loved it. The tutorial built into Emacs is very usefull from a practice standpoint, but the hardcopy does help to clear up a lot of the advanced features. Sensational!...Ingenius!!!

Rating:
Summary: only clear and useful information
Review: The book covers the complete use of Emacs (except programming Lisp extensions).
The text is most of the time clear and consise. All you will read is useful information. Moreover you often find anwsers to your questions as if the author has anticipated it (probably the experience of the 15 previous editions).
What could be better is the conceptual description of Emacs: What are the variables attached to each buffer, how the major/minor modes affects the variables ... finally what make the state of Emacs at a given time.
As a conclusion: We would like many more books of this quality.

Rating:
Summary: excellent reference
Review: This book is the only reference you need for Emacs v21. It is written by Richard Stallman, the original author of Emacs and about a gazillion other brilliant pieces of software, not to mention he is the founder of the GNU project and the FSF. The book is basically packed with useful information. It has a good table of contents and several good indexes (Key (Character) index, Command and function index, variable index and concept index). Some of the things you find are not compatable with earlier versions of emacs, and they are not always noted, but hopefully you can download the latest version anyways.

It covers the basics like opening/editting/saving files, getting online help, cutting/copying/pasting, searching/replacing, and simeltaneously working on multiple documents. Most of these simple things are also helpfully summarized on a tear-out reference card in the back. The book, however, goes into great, great detail, providing you with the massive power that Emacs (the one editor to rule them all) has.

Some other parts of the book that I found useful were the chapters covering backup files, version control (w/ RCS), major modes (i.e., modes in which the behavior of Emacs changes to suit the type of buffer you are working on. E.g., automatic indentation and highlighting in C-mode), integrated compiling with gcc and debugging with gdb, and dired (the file system browser with primative commands for deleting and other simple things). I would have been (and was) seriously lost trying to custimize Emacs without this book.

Other topics covered that I haven't yet mentioned are registers, international character support, tag tables, merging files, email and web browsing capabilities, the calender/diaries, and many other odds and ends.
What this book does not cover is the vast Emacs Lisp system. That is why I'm back on Amazon today to check out the Lisp Reference Manual. Since the Lisp manual is 900+ pages, and this book is already about 600 pages, it's easy to see why they seperated these two. My only gripe with this book is that it has terrible binding :( Oh well, it still easily merits 5 stars.