Sams Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours

To learn a complex editor like emacs, you want a boook that gets you up and running fast but also make you aware of its vast capabilities because only knowing the minimal cheat sheet information when starting out will only frustrate you and blind you to what the editor is really capable of. This book strikes that balance, its very thorough yet very brief and too the point. A book like OReilly's Learning Emacs tends more on just being brief and you may end up giving up on emacs before finishing that book. Unfortunately this book is old and out of print, you can only buy used copies, a new edition of this book is desperately needed. And as another reviewer mentioned, there is a lot of stuff missing from the CD that goes with this book, very surprising considering how meticulously this book was put together.

This is good beginner book for anyone who is un-initiated to the world of Emacs. Since this book is in a tutorial format like other Sams Teach Yourself books, one can read through this book pretty fast and get up and running using the power of Emacs very quickly. The author does a good job of introducing the reader to many of the powerful functions of emacs and also contantly mentions ways to customize the various functions.One of the sources of irritation while reading the book is that the author refers too many times to the libraries on the CD rather than the generic functions available in Emacs itself. However, this does get the reader accustomed to the idea of customizing Emacs, which is what makes Emacs such a powerful editor. There is also a introductory chapter on Lisp, which should suffice most beginners.

The word on the street is that EMACS is tough to get in touch with. The book 'Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours' proves that word wrong; it's really not that hard. Coming from the MS-Windows world, one has been used to easy-to-use editors - though not that efficient, due to the limited use of shortcut keys. My very first use of this book was as a how-to-do tutorial. A swift look in the appendix, and I was able to cut, copy, paste and navigate the source like I had never done anything else. When getting curious to learn the more advanced features of the editor, it was necessary to read the book chapter by chapter, but the way it's written makes this quite easy. For each feature mentioned, the writer does a great job explaining the differences between the GNU-Emacs, XEmacs and Emacs for WIN32. In my opinion, this book is definitely one of the better ones. The only issue lacking is how to get the best from Emacs when not using X.