Customer Reviews

Learning the vi Editor (6th Edition)

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The 6th edition of this book is excellent! For the novice, it is very readable, and is able to bring a user up to speed quickly with simple, solid coverage of the basics.

It is also an excellent resource for the more advanced users, with good informative coverage of advanced editting techniques w/vi. The section on the various clones is also well done.

If you get this book, it is worth getting the little vi Editor Pocket Reference book, too, because its small size (~ 7" x 4" & 72 pages), makes it a convenient and easy to use reference book. I keep one of these little guys by the home linux machine, and another one at the office, too.

Vi is a powerful yet difficult editor to learn in the beginning. Although there is an abundance of references on the web, it is very difficult to learn the editor effectively without a book. Even more difficult to learn is the advanced features of the editor. The book has definitely made the learning process as painless as possible. The chapters are arranged in such a way that the reader can learn the editor incrementally without being fed too much information at once. At the end of each chapter there is a reference so the reader can refresh what he/she has learned in the chapter. (This also makes the book a very good reference.) What I like most about the book is in Part II of the book: "Extensions and Clones." The book first gives a summary of all the common USEFUL features of the clonse. Then, in subsequent chapters, the author shows how to use the features in each of the clones. This has made my life much easier because I can look up what I need and then go to the particular chapter (in my case, vim) for the information in the sub-chapter.

This book covers all the trick and traps to the Vi editor. It is an excellent source for anyone who wants to learn vi. It also is excellent for those who want to go beyond the basic.

This book not only covered basic vi, but also variants such as vim, elvis, and more. I knew next to nothing going into this book, and by the end of the first few chapters, I was VERY comfortable with this often scary editor. Now that I know many of the powerful features, there's no going back to the others...

When you see someone that knows what they are doing writing with vi you will be amazed. Get a taste of it yourself and you will be hooked.

vi is powerful beyond belief and honestly I had been using it for years before I got this wonderful book from O'Reilly. The power of vi is revealing in this easy to use and well structured reference and learning aid.

Impress your friends with some of the little known and used features and functions. The authio Linda Lamb certainly knows her way around the editor so pay careful attention to the examples she uses to illustrate functions. Many of these can be used almost as-is in your daily work.

I suppose with all the latest WYSWYG word processors vi seems a little dated, but using vi I can create, edit, copy and manipulate documents in a fraction of the time others can by clicking and drilling in a windowed application.

I love vi. It's the raw power thats addicting. Yeah sometimes you can really screw the pooch with a typo but generally vi is fairly forgiving. I should know, my typing stinks but vi is generally kind to me when I mess up.

I rated this book highly in spite of I would have liked a few more examples, but the examples Lamb included are very representative of what you as a user may need and actually use.

This is a typical O'Reilly book - excellent and a worthy addition to any serious compter professionals library.

Hey I just heard that vi is available even to Windows lamers.

Try it folks, give your mouse finger a badly needed rest. Going to vi is like getting out of Chevy Impala into an Indy car. The Chevy may have better seats and A/C, but when you touch that gas pedal you'll be hooked.

I had made a couple of attempts to learn vi before, and I just didn't get it. This book made it fairly easy, and introduced me to the power and speed of vi. It lets you get started quickly, with an extremely clean, organized presentation. After a short time using vi I'm convinced that emacs is much more difficult to use properly than vi, and that windows-like editors may be simple to use but they are crippled compared to the functionality of vi. If you use a text editor more than once or twice a week do yourself a favor and learn vi. If you use different unix / linux systems you are almost compelled to learn vi since it is the only editor that's always available. This book also covers vi variants, such as the superb vim.

O'Reilly & Associates, well-known for quality computer references, have once again done a superb job with this manual for vi. This Unix text editor can often be intimidating for those who haven't been exposed to it, but once a bit of time is spent with vi, it becomes second-nature. This book greatly helps in that endeavor.

Using this book, in conjunction with making vi my default PINE editor (thereby forcing me to become fluent with it, lest my email use become rather slow and awkward,) provided a huge speed boost in learning the vi editor. Vi is very powerful, and is almost always included on every unmodified Unix install. These items, coupled with the fact that vi doesn't automatically insert line breaks (like pico does) make it one of the most-preferred text editors amongst Unix sys-admins.

Not only does _Learning the vi Editor_ cover the essentials, but moves beyond basic editing functions into more powerful features, such as global searches & replacements, customizing the editor, "moving around in a hurry," command combinations, and other advanced vi features. For even better results in using vi, pick up a copy of O'Reilly's _sed & awk_, though it's not necessary for effective vi use.

_Learning the vi Editor_ is written in a friendly, casual voice, and Linda Lamb provides what your input and output will look like for most commands, interspersed with comments that put the reader at ease, such as "Qute forboding, isn't it?" followed by reasons not to be intimidated.

This book will help just about anyone conquer the mighty vi tool, and will help prove vi's superiority over any other Unix text editor. (Ahem - no offense to the emacs gurus out there.)

It's often said that there are very few quality computer books in the world, but this is most definitely one of them.

If you've never used the vi editor before, this book is for you and if you've been using it for years, this book is also for you.

The book is organized so that the reader can start at an introductory level in the first couple of chapters and learn how to use the editor. Then as the user gets comfortable, they can go back and read the next couple of chapters and learn a great deal more. I've done this several times over several years, and my editing abilities STILL increase dramatically afterwards.

The book also goes into good detail regarding the vi clones in later chapters. I personally use gvim and found the section with specifics on vim to be of great help.

The bottom line? The book is extremely well organized and absolutely thorough in covering the topic. The book was written in 1998 and the information is still up to date. And given the fact that it's a computer book costing less than 30 dollars, the actual *value* of the book deserves 10 stars!

vi has a well-deserved reputation as being one of the least friendly editors in the UNIX world. This book, however, makes vi relatively painless to use, even for those accustomed to GUIs. Nowadays vi tends to be used mostly for quick editing of configuration scripts and the expansive amount of detail here is not likely to be that useful to people except those who plan to use vi almost exclusively. If you follow the examples, and practive using vi while reading this book, however, you will find that it does cover all the basics well and that you will feel quite at home with this much-maligned text editor. Most of this information is available freely on the net, but it not collected in one place in such an orderly fashion as this. Much of the advanced features will probably be rarely used, but if you spend a fortnight with this book in front of a UNIX or Linux box, you will find that you will be a vi pro in no time!

I began using vi because I was forced to. Where I work, there are many different flavors of UNIX and the only common editor that is on them is vi. So I began using vi referring to the commands listed in the UNIX in a Nutshell book. I was lost. I never understood why anyone would use this editor.

This book starts at the very beginning. It assumes no prior knowledge of vi or any other editor yet the beginning is very concise so you don't feel like you're wasting time which is a nice balance. You can quickly move through the chapters and you notice that not only can you work with vi, its actually very nice to never have to use the mouse or press some complicated key sequence to get what you need done. After the first few chapters, you can probably perform 90% of the tasks you need to perform. If you make it past Chapter 7, you are a vi guru. Now, I use vi whenever I can. I even have a bash shell for Windows that has vi and that is basically what I use for most editing. I would recommend this book to anyone, mainly of course those who work in the UNIX environment, that has to do text editing. Its a quick way to learn what you need to to get your work done and get vi working for you instead of the other way around.