Press Release
January 5, 2005
"Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition": A Guide to the World's Most Extensible, Customizable Editor
Sebastopol, CA--There's not a lot you can't say about Emacs: it's the most
powerful text editor available today. Unlike most editors (and in
particular, unlike the standard Unix editor, vi), Emacs is a complete
working environment. As the authors of the new edition of Learning GNU
Emacs (Cameron, Elliott, Loy, Raymond, and Rosenblatt, O'Reilly, US
$39.95) explain, "No matter what you do, you can start Emacs in the
morning, work all day and all night, and never leave it: you can use it to
edit, rename, delete, and organize files; to compile programs; to run
shell commands; and so on." Before windowing systems like X and Microsoft
Windows became popular, Emacs often served as a complete windowing system
of its own. All you needed was a terminal, and you could live within
Emacs forever.
Why, then, read a book on Emacs? Because it does so much, Emacs has a
reputation for being extremely complicated. The authors of Learning GNU
Emacs, Third Edition don't believe that's warranted. They teach Emacs
from the ground up, covering first the basics and then some of the more
advanced features.
The third edition has been completely revised and expanded to meet the
evolving needs of Emacs users, from beginner to advanced. The book
includes updated support for C++, Lisp, Perl, SQL, and Java language
modes, including the Java Development Environment for Emacs (JDEE).
Readers will learn how to customize Emacs interactively through a feature
called Custom, as well as through tweaking the startup file. The book
helps you tailor Emacs to both your data and your workflow. You'll learn
how to use syntax highlighting, how to edit columns of data, how quick
macros eliminate repetitive work, how to manage large projects using
version control, and much more. Most importantly, you'll see why Emacs
should be your editor of choice and how it can increase your
productivity.
Learning GNU Emacs covers Emacs on all major operating systems,
including a new chapter on running the latest version of Emacs on Linux,
Windows, and Mac OS X. The book provides:
A tutorial approach to learning Emacs
Tables of commands and a removable card for easy reference
Details on coding support for C/C++, Lisp, Java, and Perl
Information on HTML and XML authoring
An introduction to Lisp programming
Specifics on using version control with CVS, RCS, SCCS, and Subversion
Most importantly, the book makes learning Emacs simple. Whether you're an
experienced Emacs hacker or have never tried Emacs, you'll find a wealth
of detailed, up-to-date information on this powerful editor.
Praise for the previous edition:
"I had wanted to try Emacs for a while, but due to a couple of problems I
had, I had never bothered delving too far. The primary problem for me was
getting Emacs to word wrap properly, using whole words instead of placing
hyphens in the middle of a word. This was the first thing I looked up in
Learning GNU Emacs. Within about five minutes, not including the time it
took to download and reinstall Emacs, which had been deleted due to
extreme frustration with this word wrap thing, it was working. Lovely. All
thanks to this book. I decided to delve deeper and see what other secrets
the book held."
--Steve Coe, Canada Computes, November 2000
"As usual, O'Reilly is your one-stop shopping center for printed
references. Learning GNU Emacs will give you a firm grounding in all of
Emacs' basic features, as well as a tour of its more advanced features."
--Jeff Clites, MACTech, December 2001
Further reviews can be found here.
Additional Resources:
Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition
Debra Cameron, James Elliott, Marc Loy, Eric Raymond, and Bill Rosenblatt
ISBN: 0-596-00648-9, 509 pages, $39.95 US, $57.95 CA
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938; 1-707-827-7000
About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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