Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp

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I originally got this book to learn a few "tricks" to help me use Emacs. I am not a programmer, and thought programming was mysterious and difficult. However, Robert Chassell is an incredible teacher. I never thought programming could be explained so well to such as rank beginner as myself. And he makes it all seem very easy and logical. Not at all scary. I wish he taught at my college.

I was really excited to grab a copy of this book, and it didn't let me down. It's a gentle but thorough introduction to using elisp. I do a bit of programming in other languages, but had never tried elisp. Now I'm excited to dive in and start making emacs do (even more) work for me.

A very good introduction to using elisp. I have about a decade of experience programming and extending Emacs; I picked this up to consider giving it to my computer science students. I finally decided against it only because Successful Lisp is such an amazing book. No, really, I cannot recommend Successful Lisp highly enough.

This book is very good and focuses on the specifics of Emacs Lisp. If you are interested in extending that venerable editor, this is a good place to start. If you are interested in learning programming in Lisp (specifically Common Lisp), take a look at Successful Lisp.

Emacs is the best editor, ever. Of course, you hear people say that, and than you try to use it and get confused by ALT-META-SHIFT this and META-META-CTRL-ALT that. Look! I will let you in on a secret. Emacs is completely ***programmable*** in it's own language: Emacs lisp. With a few wizardly strokes, you can change the behavior of emacs to behave like editor X you are used too.

Now, there are alot of features of Emacs that simply make it the most useful editor around. Most important, is it's ability to split the screen. I can not stress how useful it is, when working on code, to be able to work on a file from several frames at once. There is no other editor I know of that does it like Emacs does.

There are a number of packages available for Emacs, I never looked at even 10% of them all. I like Speedbar over Emacs native file system. CEDET and Semantic bovine are nice too. If you are a beginner, you will probably find those packages are all you will need, and mostly just search on Google to find out how to alter the editor behavior so you don't have to know all the shortcuts right away. After you know your way around you learn those shortcut keys later.

Emacs requires some patience if you are new to it but when you get it you will never want to go back to some inferior product.