Rating: 
Summary: Scratching the surface
Review: A couple of things are not very hard in Emacs. Once you have a new major-mode, it's pretty easy to figure out how it works, by pressing C-h b or C-h m. This book is about the easy stuff; it covers a lot of major- and minor modes. However, it hardly tells you anything at all about the way Emacs is structured and configured. And that is one of the hardest things to figure out when you're starting to use Emacs. (I know by experience, I had to go through quite some pain before I was able to work with it properly.)So if you want more verbose explanations of major Emacs modes, this is the book you want. If you want to figure out how to customize stuff to your needs, this is not the book you want.
Rating: 
Summary: Stuff you never knew even existed plus Eric Raymond :)
Review: Great book .... I've used emacs for 4 years (right around) and i've gained a wealth of knowledge that i never knew .... So; if your going to use Emacs -- get this ... actually I'd get the 3rd edition -- but you still can't go wrong with this -- even if you are using 21.3 ;-)
Plus Eric Raymond even has contribution involved (can't help it ... I'm a fan) so had to mention that.
Rating:
Summary: easy-to-follow guide to Emacs
Review: I first learned Emacs by reading the Tutorial (C-h t). While it suffices to get me started, I notice that there are a large chunk of Emacs I haven't explorered and don't know where to start. That's the motivation of my reading this book. Argubly I can learn all the content of the book from Emacs on-line help, but I found that the easy-to-follow, tutorial-like styles of the book is more accessible than reference-style on-line help.
The 2nd ed is outdated, though. You may want to check the latest 3rd ed.
Rating:
Summary: Learning GNU emacs
Review: I found this book to be not that good. It is a bit long winded, I had a hard time using the index to find things that I was looking for. It helped me get a bit more expertise but didn't help me get to a very good level of expertise. I rarely use this book now, I would recommend looking else where for a better book to both learn and use as a reference. Wrong first buy or only buy.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book for most Emacs users
Review: I have been a vi user for a long time (6 years) and never thought I needed an alternative. This book has shown me the wonderful world of Emacs and its many modes. For very fast editing of text files and search/replace operations, vi is still the best. But for anything else, Emacs is a real time saver. I work a lot with the Fortran and LaTeX modes (with the AUCTeX package) and they both have saved me countless keystrokes, particularly with LaTeX. I find it convenient to keep this book nearby for reference as Emacs' has far too many commands to keep in one's head. It is *certainly* a very good introductory and reference book to Emacs. I will not write Lisp code in my life and the information given here is sufficient for me. Another user has mentioned that rtin and Lynx are better, but most often, you have install another dozen packages before you can use them (atleast if you *don't* use a Linux machine). Gnus works well enough for my occasional newsreading. I highly recommend this book for the 95% that are not too interested in heavy customization or esoteric uses. I most certainly will buy an extra copy to keep as a reference.
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: 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.
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