Customer Reviews

Writing GNU Emacs Extensions

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...is reading this book. Step 1 would be to read O'Reilly's "Learning Gnu Emacs" from cover to cover. Step 2 would be to start bookmarking "Info" pages in the Emacs and Elisp manuals (inside Emacs; Emacs can bookmark places in files you've edited, bookmark directories, bookmark Info pages, etc.); and then you are ready to read this book.

While you can become proficient in Emacs just by learning a handful of commands, to be truly productive and happy you must learn most of the features and use them. This is a very long process (over a year for me, learning a little bit more each day). But what I've gained from the journey is invaluable. For example, one insight I've gotten is that Emacs can work very well for the novice (open/type/save/close) and the expert (write major mode to handle new language) equally well, and this idea can apply to any software project. (Sure, it sounds simplistic but the moment of "Aha!" is more profound than that.)

This book is fairly small and progressively introduces new ideas in writing Lisp code to add functionality to Emacs. I think in retrospect the topics covered were well chosen because I have looked up the examples time and again to use code snippets.

Step 4 in mastering Emacs is to read the newsgroup gnu.emacs.help every day for a few months, which will teach you about a great many features Emacs has that are not covered in any book (or covered very well, like term mode, font-lock and many more).

If you have taken the wise step and decided to learn emacs you're aware of the eLISP substructure underlying your C- and M- actions. Once you're aware that this power is there, you will invariably want to use it to make some routine editing patterns faster / more efficient.

I mean heck, you learned emacs to hack code in, didn't you? Why not hack emacs to make your hacking faster?

In true geek fashion, I thought that this book would be, like so many of ORA's books, a canonical START on the monopoly board of computer / technology progress.

It wasn't really.

It started with introducing the notion of evaluating a lisp command string (in this case, making sure you have your ^H, ^? and Erase sorted out) - and goes from there. Too little time is spent on primitives (see, not really a programming guide as such) and instead uses a series of examples to make you think about how to use eLISP to handle an issue.

....but that's not what you expect from an ORA book is it? You want the reference and the step-by-step -- you want to know you went to the source to get the answer and here was the path, right?

Well for that you are actually better off going to gnu.org and reading the elisp manual there. It much more closely approximates the path that the ORA books (i.e. the camel book, etc.) take.

Where this fits in -- a nice reference, maybe.

IF YOU DO get this book, you'll find some handy examples and a few 'tricks of the trade. ' Nothing really great though.

Glickstein offers practical solutions to gnu-emacs problems from the opening pages and only gets better from there. He introduces emacs-lisp topics gradually, and always in the context of solving a practical problem.

One of the things I loved most about this book is that from the very first chapter, made emacs more usable by correcting some annoying traits that I had just accepted. Now I realize I can fix what I don't like!

After finishing this book, a reader should be more confident in finding and modifying solutions contained at the gnu-emacs archive.

Hopefully emacs's popularity will increase further as even more people take its destiny into their own hands. This wonderful introduction is a good start.

I found this book quite useful to get me started on writing Gnu emacs Lisp. It is clear and fairly well organized, and far easier to deal with than the standard documentation, which I find lacks the level of organization needed for so large a language.

By "large" I mean mainly the number of functions available. Lisp as a language is not really hard to learn; it is just so different from many programming languages that it requires a few days of effort to get to "aha!". After that it becomes easy.

The drawback to this book is that it doesn't take you far enough. It is an excellent start, and having worked through it you should be able to find your way around in the online or other emacs Lisp documentation. However, it lacks an index of emacs Lisp functions, or other similar reference material. I find this unfortunate, but it's not a show-stopper because once you get through this book you will know enough to use other reference material.

The book is well paced and easy to read. The concepts build naturally upon one another. Glickstein provides real world examples to introduce new features. I highly recommend it!

If the description "tutorial" means presentation of fragments of Lisp code interspersed with commentary, then this book is indeed tutorial. This book would have been much more valuable if the author had presented complete listings of his .emacs files. There are two problems with fragments. First, they are not as interesting as complete listings. Second, when you put them together and they don't work, you get to wonder whether they were complete to begin with. It is no doubt a grand book "if you know what you are doing." But if you know what you are doing, Ducky, you can learn everything you need to know by reading the HOW-TOs and the sources, then you don't need a "tutorial."

I bought this book thinking it would shed some light on why emacs says "File mode specification error: (void-function linux-c-mode)" when I put the comment /* -*- linux-c -*- */ as the first line of my source file. Emacs complains, yet that comment invokes exactly what I want: 8-space tabs. But this book doesn't talk about C mode, so it remains a mystery.