Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2012Vim has such enthusiastic users that you would expect there to be many excellent books about it, but previous books on Vim are frankly mediocre. Luckily, Practical Vim more than makes up for the problem. Saying that it's far and away the best Vim book available is true, but (unfortunately) faint praise. This is one of the best technical books I've ever read: comprehensive but never dry. It's a must-own if you are a serious Vim user.
The book is aimed primarily at intermediate Vim users, and it does a oustanding job leading such users to Vim mastery. (You could use Practical Vim as a way to learn Vim, but it would require a lot of effort initially.) Practical Vim is made up of 121 tips, and the material is divided into six large sections.
* Section I - Modes
Detailed coverage of Vim's normal, insert, visual and command-line modes
* Section II - Files
Managing multiple files at once and opening and saving files
* Section III - Getting Around Faster
Navigating more quickly within files as well as between files
* Section IV - Registers
Copy/paste registers and macros
* Section V - Patterns
Everything you ever wanted to know about Vim's (many) pattern-matching flavors as well as how to use patterns for searching and replacing text; also discusses the :global command
* Section VI - Tools
Covers various external tools (ctags, grep, ack, make, linters) that go nicely with Vim as well as internal tools like Vim's spellchecker.
I was sceptical of the tip-style at first, but it makes the book much easier to dip into as needed or wanted. It also helps to break down the material (which can get dense) into more manageable chunks, even if you read it from cover to cover.
