GNU Emacs Manual Version 20

Rating:
Summary: This guy knows what he is talking about
Review: Great book about an essential software development tools. Emacs has shown it value for decades and its extensiblity keeps is up-to-date and useful for every software programming task.

I believe money for the sale of this book goes to support free software, a great cause.

(...).

Rating:
Summary: The big enchilada
Review: In the emacs world, this is 'The Book' by 'The Man.' Emacs is an indispensible tool imho. I use it, to this very day, under Windows XP.

What's the best way to learn emacs? Buy a book, like this one, dive in and don't come out until you start to 'get it.'

When I sit back and think why I still use emacs, and ferret out all the reasons, it truly ends up being completely non-bigotry related. Emacs just literally does many things better for a certain class of text-processing activities. It's a tool in the same way UNIX shell scripting is; a tool I'll probably never live without.

What does emacs have/do that's head & shoulders better than other editors? Well, literally the list is quite long, but for starters: Regular expressions everywhere, navigation keystrokes for every conceivable structure & sub-structure of a text document, real unlimited undo, non-trivial keyboard macros, and of course for ultimate flexibility an embedded lisp interpreter.

Word is nice - I did write a fairly large novel with it - but to this day I write many many shorter documents with emacs first. Truly. Word does have some amazing features, no joke, but for a certain class of text processing activities emacs will probably always rule.

Software takes money to write, and emacs is, imho, one of the software 'pyramids' that have withstood the test of time. If you believe in the free software movement and want to learn emacs, why not buy a copy of a book by one of the men who was truly instrumental in the free software movement?

Rating:
Summary: This is the GNU Emacs Manual
Review: This book was issued to me while working as a consultant for Northern Telecom (Nortel.) They standardized on this editor, as it was the most efficient for their environment. The above description of the back cover pretty much tells it all. The book comes with a Lay Flat Binding. There is a Short Content and several page Table of Contents. Also the GNU Manifesto, Glossary, Key (Character) Index, Command and Function Index, Variable Index and Concept Index. You seldom need to go outside this reference Manual.