Writing GNU Emacs Extensions: Editor Customizations and Creations with Lisp [Paperback]

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).

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.