Rating: 
Summary: *THE* book to get for learning Emacs
Review: Most of us hacker types picked up Emacs by simply using it (and occasionally doing its bland built-in tutorials in secret). But GNU Emacs has become such a monster, and if you want to know how to use it like an expert, you need this book. This is not a manual. It's a tutorial-like course. Yes, much in the book tends to be verbose, but for people who are just getting started on emacs, this book offers an easy-to-follow path.
Of course, for vi devotees like myself, emacs sucks no matter what. :)
Rating: 
Summary: If you use Emacs, this book will be your best friend.
Review: One of the best computer books ever. If you use Unix, you must have this book. Emacs is one of the fastest and best text editors available, but it is difficult to learn how to use it. This book is clearly written and has an excellent index which points you right to what you are looking for. The reference card is also very convenient. Buy this book!
Rating:
Summary: Learning to use one of the best editors!
Review: Since 3 years I habe been using emacs. I began to use emacs only after I bought this book, which I consider the best book to learn many, many features of GNU emacs. The book contains 16 different chapters, from "emacs basics" to "LISP programming". The title of the book is GNU Emacs but the authors have includes many tips for xemacs. I find very good that they explain the commands and then they put all related commands in tables at the end of each chapter. For beginners it is very important to know the definition of the commands, but later it is bettet to find the commands in a table and this is the idea that the authors habe implemented here. Don't wait and buy this book now and begin to discover the world of emacs!Virgilio Krumbacher
Rating:
Summary: Update of a helpful Emacs guide
Review: The first part of the book is a gentle introduction to basic editing with Emacs, then proceeds on to useful intermediate topics such as dired, shell buffers, etc. The later chapters give the nitty-gritty on advanced topics such as elisp programming. The book has the virtue of retaining usefulness to the user as the user gains experience with Emacs.
The book has been updated to reflect current programming topics: for instance, the section on editing Lex and LaTeX has been dropped and a section on XML has been added.
in re Emacs:
- Emacs has a devoted (even fanatic) user base. The reasons for that are worthy of your consideration.
- The Emacs editor is very good. The keyboard functions are well thought out. The mouse is not needed, which makes it easy and fast to use for the touch-typist (though you can use the mouse if you want in the GUI versions of Emacs). Emacs' programmability makes it possible to emulate other editors, such as vi, in Emacs.
- Emacs runs on most systems. Learn one editor, run it anywhere.
- Ironically Emacs, although having a reputation for being hard to learn, has an excellent on-line help system. (The help pages are also available on the web at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/#Manuals .)
- Technically speaking, Emacs is not so much an editor as an operating environment into which an editor has been built. Versitile applications can be built inside the Emacs environment which can interact with telnet, ftp, email, web browsing, etc. These applications can be ported to any architecture that supports Emacs. Emacs is much more than "just an editor".
- For programmers who are also Emacs users, Emacs Lisp (elisp) will become the most practical language in their toolkit. Automating day-to-day, keystroke-to-keystroke functionalities will save programmers from the tedium of their jobs. Emacs is tops for automating such tasks, and is my own principle reason for using it.
- Here are two well written opinions on Emacs, each discussing the pluses and minuses:
Eric Raymond's book "The Art of Unix Programming" has discussions of Emacs scattered throughout.
Peter M. Bagnall has a very interesting critique of Emacs at
http://www.surfaceeffect.com/essays/emacs.html , where he contrasts the usefulness of its design with its reputation for being hard to learn.
- Emacs is free - you only need to apply yourself to access an enormous amount of programming capability and editing power.
- Richard Stallman's strongly expressed opinions about ... everything. I don't go along with him on many things, but I am grateful to him for Emacs.
Rating: 
Summary: easy things lengthily described
Review: The title "learning GNU Emacs is deceiving". It is an introduction to Emacs.
If you plan to use Emacs for software development, it is definitively not sufficient.
Moreover, while introducing a feature, the author think useful to write a full paragraph to explain you why you need it (for instance, why you need the command UNDO).
The positive point is that the features discussed are explained step by step so that you are sure that if you read the whole section you will understand and be able to reproduce.
Finally "GNU Emacs Manual" by R Stallman is the reference an Emacs user will need.
Rating:
Summary: easy things lengthily described
Review: The title "learning GNU Emacs is deceiving". It is an introduction to Emacs.
If you plan to use Emacs for software development, it is definitively not sufficient.
Moreover, while introducing a feature, the author think useful to write a full paragraph to explain you why you need it (for instance, why you need the command UNDO).
The positive point is that the features discussed are explained step by step so that you are sure that if you read the whole section you will understand and be able to reproduce.
Finally "GNU Emacs Manual" by R Stallman is the reference an Emacs user will need.
Rating:
Summary: More detail on the classic emacs guide
Review: This is the ideal walkthrough to take you from installing emacs through to scripting the editor with Lisp. This most recent update covers Emacs version 21.3 in both it's terminal and GUI modes. It stars with basic text editing, keyboard navigation, selection, window and buffer management. Then into macros, advanced editing features. And on into how to use Emacs to edit various types of file, and use the editor as an IDE. The last chapters writing Lisp extensions, as well as integrating Emacs with CVS.
This is more than an introductory text, most likely even advanced users will find something new. But certainly this is a book that is ideally suited to beginners.
Rating:
Summary: As good as a book can get
Review: This is the only computer-related book I have 2 copies of, one for work and another at home. With this book Emacs goes from a powerful text editor to a powerful productivity tool. It amazes me that programmers try to get by with any other editor and this book is the place to start with Emacs.
Rating:
Summary: Could be larger still
Review: You will become functionally literate in Emacs with this book. It's large and friendly, unlike Emacs, and you have to dedicate a lot of time to learning this lovable, beastly editor. (Emacs is not so much a text editor as an IDE + calendar + interface to Unix tools rolled into one). Learning Emacs to its very core is a good education for any programmer... I can't imagine a benefit to any non-programmer (or non-technical person) in this day and age (Emacs dates back to the 1970's, technology-wise). Its extensibility is indeed legendary, but RMAIL is simply not as good as a dozen other mail clients; Gnus cannot compare to Netscape's news reader or rtin; w3 is not as good as Lynx for plain-text Web surfing; buffers are nice but I find 'screen' to be a better tool, and 'vi' faster for just plain text editing. The advantage is Emacs can do all of these together, with major and minor modes providing the hooks (pun intended) to integrate the work. Emacs is a jack of all trades and master of... a few, at least. All that said, I found the lack of regular expression search/replace examples mystifying, no discussion at all of registers or the mark ring, and after reading the *whole thing* I still wanted more. Maybe more major modes for the next edition? :-)
Rating:
Summary: easily edit HTML and XML
Review: [A review of the 3rd EDITION.]
To think that emacs was once a little text editor, back in the 80s. The authors describe how it has grown mightily in 20 years, driven by the generously donated time of its fans. The basic editing abilities are of course still there. Essentially unchanged over the years. If this is all you need emacs for, then that is certainly fine.
Ah, but now the book shows support for writing HTML and XML. As well as a nifty browser mode. (Imagine emacs as a browser!) So that you can edit a raw HTML document, with all its requisite tags visible, and then toggle to display it in the emacs browser. Very handy. Other alternatives like the vi editor require you to run vi in one terminal and have a browser showing that file. The XML support is also useful. Actually, the book shows how emacs can handle the broader case of SGML.
Many more emacs features are covered. But the above 2 are prominent ones that should appeal to many.
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