Learning GNU Emacs (A Nutshell Handbook) 2nd Updated Edition

by Debra Cameron (Author), Bill Rosenblatt (Author), Eric S. Raymond (Author)

12 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1565921528

ISBN-10: 1565921526

Why is ISBN important?

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Other Sellers

from

Other Sellers

See all 5 versions

: | Details

Sold by Jenson Books Inc

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

32 used from $5.87

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon or get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Ships from and sold by YourOnlineBookstore.

FREE delivery: March 31 - April 5

List Price: $34.95

Save: $13.96 (40%)

7 new from $4.98

There is a newer edition of this item:

Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition
$28.55
(38)
In Stock.

Using Emacs as an Internet Toolkit (to use electronic mail and Usenet news, telnet to other computers, retrieve files using FTP, browse the World Wide Web, and author Web documents)
Emacs' rich, comprehensive online help facilities
How to edit files with Emacs
Using Emacs as a "shell environment"
How to take advantage of "built-in" formatting features
How to use multiple buffers, Emacs windows, and X Windows
Customizing Emacs
The Emacs interface to the X Window System, which allows you to use a mouse and pop-up menus
Whys and hows of writing macros to circumvent repetitious tasks
Emacs as a programming environment
The basics of Emacs LISP
How to get Emacs

The book is aimed at new Emacs users, whether or not they are programmers. Also useful for readers switching from other Emacs implementations to GNU Emacs.

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Debra Cameron
38
Paperback
$28.55
Richard M. Stallman
3
Paperback
$39.99

Special offers and product promotions

Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

GNU Emacs is the most popular and widespread of the Emacs family of editors. It is also the most powerful and flexible. Unlike all other text editors, GNU Emacs is a complete working environment -- you can stay within Emacs all day without leaving. This book tells you how to get started with the GNU Emacs editor. It will also "grow" with you: as you become more proficient, this book will help you learn how to use Emacs more effectively. It takes you from basic Emacs usage (simple text editing) to moderately complicated customization and programming. The second edition of Learning GNU Emacs describes all of the new features of GNU Emacs 19.30, including fonts and colors, pull-down menus, scroll bars, enhanced X Window support, and correct bindings for most standard keys. GNUS, a Usenet newsreader, and ange-ftp mode, a transparent interface to the file transfer protocol, are also described. Learning GNU Emacs, second edition, covers: Using Emacs as an Internet Toolkit (to use electronic mail and Usenet news, telnet to other computers, retrieve files using FTP, browse the World Wide Web, and author Web documents) Emacs' rich, comprehensive online help facilities How to edit files with Emacs Using Emacs as a "shell environment" How to take advantage of "built-in" formatting features How to use multiple buffers, Emacs windows, and X Windows Customizing Emacs The Emacs interface to the X Window System, which allows you to use a mouse and pop-up menus Whys and hows of writing macros to circumvent repetitious tasks Emacs as a programming environment The basics of Emacs LISP How to get Emacs Quick-reference card listing all the commands discussed in the book The book is aimed at new Emacs users, whether or not they are programmers. Also useful for readers switching from other Emacs implementations to GNU Emacs.

From the Back Cover

GNU Emacs is the most popular and widespread of the Emacs family of editors. It is also the most powerful and flexible. Unlike other text editors, GNU Emacs is a complete working environment; you can stay within Emacs all day without leaving. This book tells you how to get started, but it will also "grow" with you: as you become more proficient, it will help you learn to use Emacs more effectively. It takes you from basic Emacs usage (simple text editing) to moderately complicated customization and programming. The second edition of Learning GNU Emacs describes all of the new features of GNU Emacs 19.30, including fonts and colors, pull-down menus, scrollbars, enhanced X Window System support, and correct bindings for most standard keys. Gnus, a Usenet newsreader, and ange-ftp mode, a transparent interface to the file transfer protocol, are also described. This book covers using Emacs as an Internet toolkit; Emacs' rich, comprehensive online help facilities; how to edit files with Emacs; using Emacs as a "shell environment"; how to take advantage of "built-in" formatting features; how to use multiple buffers, Emacs windows, and X windows; customizing Emacs; the Emacs interface to the X Window System; whys and hows of writing macros to circumvent repetitious tasks; Emacs as a programming environment; the basics of Emacs LISP; and how to get Emacs. Also included is a handy quick-reference card listing all of the commands discussed in the book.

Publisher : O'Reilly & Associates; 2nd Updated edition (September 11, 1996)
Language : English
Paperback : 568 pages
ISBN-10 : 1565921526
ISBN-13 : 978-1565921528
Item Weight : 1.94 pounds
Dimensions : 7 x 1.29 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,287,720 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #565 in Unix Operating System
- #1,132 in Computer Operating Systems (Books)
- #11,378 in Computer Software (Books)

Customer Reviews:
12 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		29%
4 star		20%
3 star		10%
2 star		10%
1 star		31%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Steve Wainstead

Could be larger still

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2000

Verified Purchase

You will become functionally literate in Emacs with this book. It's large and friendly, unlike Emacs, and you have to dedicate a lot of time to learning this lovable, beastly editor. (Emacs is not so much a text editor as an IDE + calendar + interface to Unix tools rolled into one).
Learning Emacs to its very core is a good education for any programmer... I can't imagine a benefit to any non-programmer (or non-technical person) in this day and age (Emacs dates back to the 1970's, technology-wise). Its extensibility is indeed legendary, but RMAIL is simply not as good as a dozen other mail clients; Gnus cannot compare to Netscape's news reader or rtin; w3 is not as good as Lynx for plain-text Web surfing; buffers are nice but I find 'screen' to be a better tool, and 'vi' faster for just plain text editing.
The advantage is Emacs can do all of these together, with major and minor modes providing the hooks (pun intended) to integrate the work. Emacs is a jack of all trades and master of... a few, at least.
All that said, I found the lack of regular expression search/replace examples mystifying, no discussion at all of registers or the mark ring, and after reading the *whole thing* I still wanted more. Maybe more major modes for the next edition? :-)

62 people found this helpful

Helpful

Mark Ruzomberka

The road less traveled

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2007

It seemed odd to me during my Sophomore year at Penn State that the Computer Science Department wanted me to learn a text editor to do computer programming on UNIX computers. In the business classes students were taught to use an IDE on Windows computers. I remember asking myself why would I be one of the few to learn how to use a text editor to do computer programming when the masses where learning to use a GUI approach. I made up my mind that the computer scientists probably knew more about programming than the business professors, and taking the road less traveled has made all the difference.

While I am no where near a Emacs expert this book has made me into more than just a casual user. Learning how to do the keyboard macros has saved me countless hours of work over the years. Sometimes if I plan on doing a lot of typing for a business document I'll use emacs to get started so I don't have to lift my fingers off the keys, then paste the text into word for formatting.

Using this book to expand my previous knowledge of Emacs has had exponential return on investment. I highly recommend it, to anyone that is trying to learn or wants to improve their emacs skill level.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Virgilio Krumbacher

Learning to use one of the best editors!

Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2001

Since 3 years I habe been using emacs. I began to use emacs only after I bought this book, which I consider the best book to learn many, many features of GNU emacs. The book contains 16 different chapters, from "emacs basics" to "LISP programming". The title of the book is GNU Emacs but the authors have includes many tips for xemacs. I find very good that they explain the commands and then they put all related commands in tables at the end of each chapter. For beginners it is very important to know the definition of the commands, but later it is bettet to find the commands in a table and this is the idea that the authors habe implemented here. Don't wait and buy this book now and begin to discover the world of emacs!
Virgilio Krumbacher

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Wilfred Springer

Scratching the surface

Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2002

A couple of things are not very hard in Emacs. Once you have a new major-mode, it's pretty easy to figure out how it works, by pressing C-h b or C-h m. This book is about the easy stuff; it covers a lot of major- and minor modes. However, it hardly tells you anything at all about the way Emacs is structured and configured. And that is one of the hardest things to figure out when you're starting to use Emacs. (I know by experience, I had to go through quite some pain before I was able to work with it properly.)
So if you want more verbose explanations of major Emacs modes, this is the book you want. If you want to figure out how to customize stuff to your needs, this is not the book you want.

14 people found this helpful

Helpful

*THE* book to get for learning Emacs

Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2004

Most of us hacker types picked up Emacs by simply using it (and occasionally doing its bland built-in tutorials in secret). But GNU Emacs has become such a monster, and if you want to know how to use it like an expert, you need this book. This is not a manual. It's a tutorial-like course. Yes, much in the book tends to be verbose, but for people who are just getting started on emacs, this book offers an easy-to-follow path.

Of course, for vi devotees like myself, emacs sucks no matter what. :)

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

M. F. Forest

easy things lengthily described

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2003

The title "learning GNU Emacs is deceiving". It is an introduction to Emacs.
If you plan to use Emacs for software development, it is definitively not sufficient.
Moreover, while introducing a feature, the author think useful to write a full paragraph to explain you why you need it (for instance, why you need the command UNDO).
The positive point is that the features discussed are explained step by step so that you are sure that if you read the whole section you will understand and be able to reproduce.
Finally "GNU Emacs Manual" by R Stallman is the reference an Emacs user will need.

14 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Stuff you never knew even existed plus Eric Raymond :)

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2003

Great book .... I've used emacs for 4 years (right around) and i've gained a wealth of knowledge that i never knew .... So; if your going to use Emacs -- get this ... actually I'd get the 3rd edition -- but you still can't go wrong with this -- even if you are using 21.3 ;-)
Plus Eric Raymond even has contribution involved (can't help it ... I'm a fan) so had to mention that.

Helpful

Steve Roche (stephen.roche@stest.ch)

Excellent reference manual

Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 1998

An excellent book, very thorough with clear examples and explanations. If you already know emacs or want to learn, this book is a must. I've been using emacs for 2 years now but I still learnt alot of new things from this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

C. C. Williams

Good book, badly needs updating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 17, 2001

Verified Purchase

This is a fine and informative book, well structured and easy to read. However, the version of Emacs under consideration, 19.29, is some way behind the current release. I'd like any update to cover NT Emacs as well.

5 people found this helpful

See all reviews