Professional SlickEdit (Programmer to Programmer) [Paperback]

John Hurst (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 5, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0470122153 | ISBN-13: 978-0470122150

Professional SlickEditis the first guide to the award-winning SlickEdit tools, and is technically reviewed by the SlickEdit development team. SlickEdit expert John Hurst shares his years of experience in developing with SlickEdit to teach readers how to maximize the tool’s features, and to write and debug code faster than they have before. Additionally, the book includes a CD ROM with an extended trial version of SlickEdit not available anywhere else.

Professional SlickEdit is heavy on examples, making this a hands-on guide that will get readers up and running with the tools quickly. Topics include:

• Customizing the environment
• Staying organized with Workspaces and Projects
• Understanding Tagging
• Quickly navigating code
• Power editing techniques for text, code and data
• Taking advantage of Aliases and File Templates
• Slick-C Macro Programming
• Custom Language Support
• DIFFzilla and other tools

And More!

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Professional SlickEdit

Enabling programmers to create, navigate, modify, and debug code faster and more accurately than other Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), SlickEdit is a multi-platform, multi-language code editor that supports seven platforms and more than 40 languages. SlickEdit expert John Hurst believes that a powerful and versatile programming editor is the most important tool that a professional programmer can use, which is precisely why he has been using SlickEdit for more than a decade. In this invaluable book, he shares experiences, techniques, and strategies to help you get the most from SlickEdit.

Replete with helpful examples, this hands-on guide shows you how to maximize the many features of SlickEdit, edit and navigate large files, and customize and extend SlickEdit to meet your needs—regardless of the programming language you use. Ultimately, you'll come to discover why SlickEdit maintains an edge over other IDEs and you'll quickly get SlickEdit to work effectively for you.

What you will learn from this book

• How to stay organized with workspaces and projects
• Ways to navigate code efficiently
• Various techniques for power editing text, code, and data
• Myriad ways to take advantage of aliases and file templates
• How to customize and extend SlickEdit with Slick-C macro programming
• Tips for understanding Context Tagging
• Advanced topics such as Slick-C macro programming and DIFFzilla

Bonus CD-ROM
The included CD contains source code and examples from the book as well as trial versions of SlickEdit for the following platforms:

• Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows NT
• Linux kernel 2.6 and compliance with LSB 3.1 or later

• AIX 5 and later

• HP-UX 11 and later

• IRIX 6.5 and later

• Solaris SPARC 7 and later

• Solaris x86

• Mac OS X v10.4, X11 for Mac OS X

Who this book is for
This book is for experienced programmers working in one or more of the 40 languages supported by SlickEdit. No previous experience with SlickEdit is necessary.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author

John Hurst has been programming computers for fun and profit since he was 14. He started with BASIC on a home computer and then moved on to Pascal and C. He has worked with many other languages since, and today works mostly with Java and Ruby.
He is an independent consultant/developer and provides design, development and training services to companies in New Zealand and Australia. You can find out about John on his website at http://www.skepticalhumorist.co.nz.

Product Details

• Paperback: 472 pages
• Publisher: Wrox (November 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470122153
• ISBN-13: 978-0470122150
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #915,937 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Mistitled: It should be "WROX macros for SlickEdit", May 10, 2008

By 

Dave the Rave - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional SlickEdit (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

I was excited to find this book about SlickEdit, but my reading the covers, the intro and a quick browse at the bookstore didn't reveal what it's really about. True, the book covers the various features of SlickEdit, and it's better than the documentation that comes with the product.

But the bulk of the book is about the WROX macros that come with the book. That's all well and good if that's what you want. They should just say that in the title. Virtually every chapter about each feature starts with some pages about SlickEdit. But three or four pages into it, you're introduced to the WROX macros, then the rest of the chapter talks about that.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth having for the "Context Tagging" chapter alone., May 6, 2008

By 

B. Crouse (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional SlickEdit (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

I started using SlickEdit recently after changing jobs, which has me working on embedded C and C++ code. After evaluating several editors, both commercial and open source, I settled on SlickEdit version 13, because it was easy to setup with my software projects and included a lot of documentation on how to use all of its features. There are a lot of features.

Professional SlickEdit does have some overlap with the product manual, but it definitely gets into the "why" things are done instead of the "how" things are done. The chapter on context tagging was especially helpful for me. The manual gives instruction on how to setup the tagging for a workspace and for a language, but it doesn't talk about why you would use one method over the other. Professional SlickEdit fills in the gaps by giving recommendations and explaining some of the more obscure aspects of the editor so you can optimize it. The author also provides his personal opinion on ways to customize the application to make working with SlickEdit easier. I really liked this aspect of the book, because my background has mostly been with Visual Studio which is basically used how Microsoft gives it to you, in contrast with the embedded world where you have to set up your own editor to work with a code base. It was nice to see an example of how things could be done, since no two people in my development team seem to be using the same text editing tool. The key binding provided with the book is one example.

So bottom line, SlickEdit is a powerful editor and I would recommend this Wrox title to anyone that wants to get up to speed with it quickly.