Customer Reviews

Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to get the Most out of the Latest Vim Editor: From personalizing Vim to productivity optimizations: Recipes to make life easier for experienced Vim users

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I like this book. It is concise. It assumes that you are probably comfortable with Vim, but want to get more out of Vim. You can easily skip around and browse difference recipes. I also like the fact that it packs in a lot of info in a slim volume. So many authors tend to give too much detail. I like a book like this because
it gives you enough to get you started and no more.

The only downside of this book is that it's $40 for 210 pages. I think that pretty pricey even in the over-priced world of technical books. If this book were $10 I would buy copies for my friends. If this book were $20 I would buy it without reservations. If this book were $30 then I would not be complaining about the price.
But at $40 I'm tempted to say that someone who is moderately motivated could probably save their money and use :h and the vimtips.

This book sells itself as a cookbook for Vim experts. However, it reads like it is written for a juvenile audience that has only recently opened Vim a few times. At points where the book starts to get interesting, it refers the reader to Vim help docs.

Its table of contents is longer (4 pages, two front and two back) than its index (3 pages, two front and one back). I expected to be able to pick this book up and use it as a Vim7 reference. This really isn't possible with this book.

This book has merit, but it's overpriced, and it isn't what it claims to be. Someone needs to write a complete and updated Vim reference. For now, this book mind remind you of a few cool features of Vim, but it will not change your world.

Personally, I get more out of the Vim quick reference cards I have taped around my desk.

Throughout the years, there have been many clones and re-implementations of the venerable vi editor. One variant of vi that emerged and stayed with us is VIM. Since it's introduction, VIM has proven itself a worthy successor to the traditional vi editor. VIM has rightfully taken the place of standard vi implementations as the spiritual successor to vi, completely replacing the vi editor on many, if not all of the current Linux distributions. Many improvements have been made to VIM such as tabs, spell checking, folding, and many, many more. However many of these new enhancements may still remain hidden to anyone who isn't keeping up on the cutting edge of VIM development. Hacking VIM is a good resource for becoming more familiar with the new features of VIM and how to make them work best for you.

Hacking VIM is a short book, weighing in at a scant 210 pages. The book contains six chapters, and two appendices. The first chapter covers the history of VIM, and the lineage of vi clones that preceded it. Chapter 2 covers personalizing VIM. This chapter covers how to really take VIM and customize it for your own needs, from changing the fonts and colors for GVIM to personalizing the status bar, and using tabs. Chapter 3 deals with navigating better in VIM, whether it's in a singular file, or a group of files (which is especially important for several programming environments). Chapter 4 discusses the many productivity enhancements of VIM, such as templates, auto-completion, code folding, sessions, and the built in diff mode. Advanced formatting is covered in chapter 5, which has a few interesting tips on making code look better. Rounding out the book (and weighing in as the largest chapter of the book) is scripting VIM. VIM has excellent scripting capabilities, and this chapter covers them in great detail, from finding scripts to writing your own. Lastly, the Appendix covers some of the neat scripts available for VIM, such as a minesweeper game, and the obligatory Towers of Hanoi puzzle and mail client (because no software is considered done until it reads mail and news. :) )

Hacking VIM prefaces each tip with which version of VIM will work with each function. There were only a few instances where I noticed that a particular function was mis-marked as requiring a later version of VIM that actually worked with earlier versions. The book also contains good images which help demonstrate some of the more visual components of VIM, like tabs, folding, and the spell checker.

Hacking VIM is chock-full of useful tips for getting the most out of VIM. The book is aimed at those who have already gained some familiarity with the VIM editor, and is by no means a tutorial for the novice user. There is clearly a bias in this book to the intermediate and advanced VIM users. Unfortunately, this is at odds with the first chapter, which starts with a history of the VIM editor. This wastes some of the space of the book, and would have been best used with more unique and different tips. Also, having some experience with VIM, I found certain tips weren't worth the trouble, and others quite confusing. The section on signs was a bit confusing, and I'm still unclear on why they're worth the trouble. There were several instances where I wondered what the productive benefit of a tip would be. On the other hand, I did find several tips invaluable. It's easy to overlook new functions in the CHANGELOGs, so I missed that newer versions of VIM had integrated spell-checking. Overall, Hacking VIM had enough good tips in it that I hadn't discovered on my own to make it worth the read.

Like most editors, VIM can induce editor fiddling sessions that result in little work being done, and Hacking VIM contains lots of fodder to make even the most ardent tweaker happy. Unless you carefully follow the mailing lists for VIM, and try every new feature as it is released, you might miss some really helpful productivity enhancers. My only wish for this book would be more focus on really productive tips, and less history about the other versions of vi that didn't survive. Hacking VIM may have lots of "of course" items for the truly seasoned VIM user, but for those of us who don't keep up-to-date with the latest features, Hacking VIM is an excellent way to get more familiar with some of the truly great features that have been introduced in later VIM versions.

There are only two books on vim: This one and "Vi iMproved" (VIM) by Steve Oualline. In my eyes, "Hacking Vim" is the better of the two books for a couple of reasons:
* It covers features of vim 7.
* It assumes you know the basic stuff and mainly teaches interesting and useful things ;-)
* It has many examples of vim script.
* The typesetting is much nicer, this makes the book easier to read.

The book consists of inspiring ideas for people who work everyday with VIM. It is an excellent starting point to go beyond standard usage of the editor. Rather then go through the whole help documents you start with hints and pieces of code that lets you customize VIM and turn it into real powerful tool for programming, notes making, authoring, and many other things. You can even finally learn vim scripting easily so vim will do exactly what you want it to do.
Book worthy of reading and trying to boost your daily productivity.

It's not entirely clear who the target market for this book is. Clearly, someone new to vim is not the audience, because it provides no help for those who are unfamiliar with vi style editors. What it seems best at is covering the features unique to vim, and some (very) basic tutorial like guidance. This is not a book for vim experts, none of the material is anything not found in the documentation to vim, and it's all pretty well known.

That said, putting all this information in one easily digested place is pretty useful, and there's a bit about the scripting engine which I thought was a fairly good introduction to the topic, and there's some vim addon suggestions for programming, writing text, and even some games/unusual addons.

There is a lot of information in this book. It wastes no time or space describing the many ways to make your Vim experience even more efficient than it already is. Because of its very cut and dry style it reads more like a reference book than anything else, but I think that's perfectly fine for this style of book. It is essentially a slightly more readable, more detailed and better written version of a lot of the Vim help. It's also nice because in many of the chapters, especially the first few ("Better Navigation" and "Production Boosters") you can pick up a lot of interesting tips. I even learned a few handy commands I had no idea about.

There are a few things wrong with it though. Some things are too close to the Vim built-in help and you're probably better off just looking there. Also, the index isn't very useful and it'd be nice to have a searchable version of the book as well. Like I said, there is a lot of information in this book. It's not for everyone, but I think most Vim users will find plenty of useful stuff in its pages.

Hacking Vim is a cookbook for becoming more productive using Vim and GVim. At 200 pages, it is not a large book, but it is packed with recipes and tips. The recipes range from simple stuff, like changing the color scheme, to advanced tasks, like creating and distributing Vim scripts. Some of the recipes apply only to GVim.

The recipes are organized into four categories, each devoted a separate chapter: personalization, navigation, production boosters and advanced formatting. Each chapter contains around ten to fifteen recipes. In addition, there are tips scattered all through the book. In general, I liked the format and the table of contents makes it easy to find a given recipe.

The final chapter is a tutorial for creating Vim scripts, covering everything from development to distribution. Instructions are included for creating the scripts using other programming languages, like Python and Ruby.

The appendices are more useful than in the average book. They include a survey of unusual Vim plugins, like games and mail clients. A sort of bonus recipe about storing the Vim configuration file online is also included.

If you use Vim and are not an expert, I think this is a valuable book to own, though the US $40 price tag seems a little steep to me.

The book "Hacking Vim" provides a number of tips, hints, setup ideas, scripts, functions, and ways of improving the Vim experience. There are many topics covered, from heavy-duty Vim use for programming to cosmetic aspects of Vim set up. Whether you will get enough out of the book to warrant its $39.99 list price tag depends on your current level of Vim usage, but from my experience most Vim users will find something of use.

The book assumes the reader has a generous familiarity with Vim. Hacking Vim is not a Vim instruction manual or tutorial on basic Vim usage. It will tell you how to use some of Vim's more involved or complicated features. It will not instruct you in basic movement and editing skills.

You must be adept enough with Vim to not be afraid to change its settings and or to learn and use more advanced features of the editor. Intermediate and more advanced users of Vim should have no problem getting useful tips from this book. Beginners with Vim will still find useful information, and may grow into understanding other information the book provides, but make sure Vim is something you want to dedicate a significant amount of time to before buying a book like this.

The book is written in a rather concise style, though the 'tell them what you'll tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them' format is a little pedantic. Part of the book is used to tell the history of Vim, vi, and other vi-like editors, which is marginally useful especially if you are a Vim user for a long time. You may learn something, though, if you have not used other vi-like editors.

Some of the tips in the book cover standard Vim commands, so in this respect the book overlaps with Vim's help system. However, the logical organization of the book into functions helps the user find and understand the material faster and easier. The Vim help system is often confusing to navigate, even for intermediate users. Note that this book does cover using and searching the Vim help system.

The book is mainly written for Vim version 7+. For previous versions of vim and gvim, icons are provided to indicate which are able to use the discussed recipe, tip, or map. This is a nice feature for those using older versions of vim.

Personally, I wanted to read this book just to see if it would teach me something I didn't know. The book was successful in this regard. I learned several things from reading this book, and reminded myself of some things I had forgotten, so it was a worthwhile experience. Seeing how someone else uses Vim, as in this book, is also useful even though I may not always use Vim in the same fashion for my own editing tasks.

Hacking Vim by Kim Schulz, a book truly suited for the average Vim user looking to find his or her way into the advanced and wonderful world of Vim. From basic customization to fully advanced scripting, this book has it all.
To begin the book shows you what I consider to be the most important part of Vim, making it pretty! Of course in the process it also outlines a number of useful tips in order to increase usability and productivity. The book also devotes what seems like a small chapter on GVim, Vim's GUI counterpart, and some of the more advanced menu options it has available. Although this chapter didn't appeal to me directly it wasn't so intrusive that it actually got in the way, just skip a few pages and we're back to hacking the core of Vim again.
The book continues by showing you a better way to navigate Vim, faster searching, multiple files. It introduces you to the tabbing features of Vim and how to use them effectively. From this point the book takes a bit of a turn and begins to focus more so on using Vim while in a programming environment, specifically C/C++. Many of the tips given could be easily applied to other languages, Perl, Ruby, etc., however specific examples do not exist which at times can make some of the concepts being taught a little tricker to follow.
The final chapter of the book goes into the Vim scripting language and the power and versatility it has. In fact the final chapter could be expanded into a new book and still only begin to scratch the surface. Luckily, just like Hacking Vim itself the scripting chapter starts off by showing you how to set up your scripting environment effectively and then moves you through the syntax of the language. The book finishes on a high note by showing a handful of "useless" yet important Vim scripted games that show the full capabilities of the Vim scripting language.
All in all this book showed me the parts of Vim that I had only previously heard about but never understood. This book has showed me a number of improvements for my own .vimrc as well as how to use Vim effectively when handling any task. In fact this very review was written in Vim, something I never would have done before reading this book, spell checking and all.