Customer Reviews

Professional SlickEdit (Programmer to Programmer)

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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.

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.