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: 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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