By Debra Cameron, Bill Rosenblatt, Eric S. Raymond
Second Edition
September 1996
Pages: 560
ISBN 10: 1-56592-152-6 |
ISBN 13: 9781565921528
(Average of 3 Customer Reviews)
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This comprehensive guide to the GNU Emacs editor, one of the most widely used and powerful editors available under UNIX, covers basic editing, several important "editing modes" (special Emacs features for editing specific types of documents, including email, Usenet News, and the Web), and customization and Emacs LISP programming. It is aimed at new Emacs users, whether or not they are programmers, and includes a quick-reference card. Covers Version 19.30.
Full Description
- Using Emacs as an Internet Toolkit (to use electronic mail and Usenet news, telnet to other computers, retrieve files using FTP, browse the World Wide Web, and author Web documents)
- Emacs' rich, comprehensive online help facilities
- How to edit files with Emacs
- Using Emacs as a "shell environment"
- How to take advantage of "built-in" formatting features
- How to use multiple buffers, Emacs windows, and X Windows
- Customizing Emacs
- The Emacs interface to the X Window System, which allows you to use a mouse and pop-up menus
- Whys and hows of writing macros to circumvent repetitious tasks
- Emacs as a programming environment
- The basics of Emacs LISP
- How to get Emacs
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Book details
Second Edition: September 1996
ISBN: 1-56592-152-6
Pages: 560
Average Customer Reviews: (Based on 3 Reviews)
Featured customer reviews
Learning GNU Emacs, 2nd Edition Review, March 09 2004
How about an update to version 21.x of Emacs? The in-print edition is **O-L-D**.
Learning GNU Emacs, 2nd Edition Review, June 05 2002
This book covers toomuch useless material. Nobody is going to check mail/ftp/telnet/news/browse with emacs. Yes, Emacs can do these things, but so what? It dosn't mater. A browser like NS can do it too, and better. The main point of emacs is that it's suposed to be a good word processor; that it can be use to write and assist in debuging code.
My intrest in Emacs was as a programer, and this book failed me totaly. The section on programing is 10 pages long. If you want to use emacs to code, just look for the info on the net. There isn't anything in this book that you couldn't find in a student essay on using emacs as a programing tool.
I find this book to be much to long getting to the point. The material covered in the frist five chapters is covered in the free tutorial included with emacs. 120 pages to explain what the sentence "Open emacs, press Ctrl-h t and read the tutorial."
I think that the writers (yes, it took 3 people) of this book thought that people might want to use emacs for word processing, and I think the writer was paid by the page, not the project, hence the 500 page book.
To the editors I say: Trim about 200 pages off this one. Emacs is full of features, but lots of them are useless and exotic. Try to make the next edition of this book more like your book on bash (shell).
To people wanting this book I say: forget it. Your throwing your cash away. Do a search on Google, this book dosn't deliver. I would take mine back to the store, but I pulled out the little 'hint' card in the back, so they wont take it back.
Learning GNU Emacs, 2nd Edition Review, June 09 2001
How about an update to the 20.x version of Emacs?
Learning GNU Emacs, 2nd Edition Review, March 02 1998
Submitted by Ed Welsh [Respond | View]
Learning GNU Emacs sparked a religious conversion for me -- as a longtime
user of vi, that lean, durable, utility, I have always held Emacs
in disdain. Until I started paging through this book! Suddenly, I'm
ready to release all my command-mode finger memory and start
anew with Ctrl and Meta keys. And why? Because the authors set forth,
step by step, exactly what Emacs can really do for me. Looks like ssh
just finished compiling in the bash window of my Emacs session, so
I will leave this review and scroll through the INSTALL file in the top window.
I wouldn't be doing this without this book.
Media reviews
"I had wanted to try Emacs for a while, but due to a couple of problems I had, I had never bothered delving too far. The primary problem for me was getting Emacs to word wrap properly, using whole words instead of placing hyphens in the middle of a word. This was the first thing I looked up in Learning GNU Emacs .Within about five minutes, not including the time it took to download and reinstall Emacs, which had been deleted due to extreme frustration with this word wrap thing, it was working. Lovely. All thanks to this book .I decided to delve deeper and see what other secrets the book held."
--Steve Coe, Canada Computes, Nov 2000
"As usual, O'Reilly & Associates is your one-stop shopping center for printed references. 'Learning GNU Emacs' will give you a firm grounding in all of emacs basic features, as well as a tour of its more advanced features."
--Jeff Clites, MACTech, Dec 2001
"an excellent book, which goes into a great deal of detail and is a good read."
--Steve Coe, Canada Computes, May 10, 2001
"Incredibly useful."
--Steve Coe, Computer Paper, December 2000
"Amazon.com's Bestselling Title of 1998 in the Category of Emacs"
"Authors Debra Cameron and Bill Rosenblatt do a particularly admirable job presenting the extensive functionality of GNU Emacs in well-organized, easily digested chapters.... Despite its title, 'Learning GNU Emacs' could easily serve as a reference for the experienced Emacs user."
--Linda Branagan, Convex Computer Corporation
