Harley Hahn's Emacs Field Guide

by Harley Hahn

In this book, Harley Hahn demystifies Emacs for programmers, students, and everyday users. The first part of the book carefully creates a context for your work with Emacs. What exactly is Emacs? How does it relate to your personal need to work quickly and to solve problems? Hahn then explains the technical details you need to understand to work with your operating system, the various interfaces, and your file system. In the second part of the book, Hahn provides an authoritative guide to the fundamentals of thinking and creating within the Emacs environment. You start by learning how to install and use Emacs with Linux, BSD-based Unix, Mac OS X, or Microsoft Windows. Written with Hahn's clear, comfortable, and engaging style, Harley Hahn's Emacs Field Guide will surprise an engaging book to enjoy now, a comprehensive reference to treasure for years to come. What You Will Learn Who This Book Is For Programmers, students, and everyday users, who want an engaging and authoritative introduction to the complex and powerful Emacs working environment.

Genres: Computers, Technology

297 pages, Paperback

Published July 31, 2016

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

There really aren't a whole lot of books written on Emacs. Fortunately, this is a GREAT introduction! You COULD just use the Emacs built-in tutorial, but this book helps explain how Emacs actually works and gives examples for almost every command. It also takes you through the commands in a logical way grouping similar commands together. And the author does a great job of making it as easy as possible to use this as a reference book, even if you're reading the print version. Obviously, there's a table of contents & index, but there's also an appendix for all the commands that were covered as well as an index for the key sequences & variables/functions.

I was hesitant to read a book when I decided to learn Emacs fearing how dry the material would probably be. However, Mr. Hahn has done a fantastic job of preventing this. He kept my attention and kept the book as brief as possible while still giving enough information.

If I had to complain about something, I'd probably get rid of Chapter 2: Unix for Emacs Users. In there, Mr. Hahn talks about the history of Unix/Linux & a brief introduction to using them. I just feel like somebody that needs such a basic intro to these operating systems is either far from ready to start using Emacs or won't need it at all because they're using it on Windows. Not to mention there are already a multitude of other books/online resources for getting to know Unix/Linux (including a book the author, himself, wrote). Leaving this chapter out would focus the book more on the reason I bought it & slim it down even further. However, this isn't a big deal as I just skipped that chapter.

All-in-all, I'd love to see a follow-up book from this author focusing on advanced Emacs topics. This book does briefly talk about how to customize Emacs, but leaves most of the figuring out to the reader.

[Andi Siswa · Rating 5 out of 5]

tldr: Sempurna!, sangat disarankan [5/5]. Wajib dibaca bagi pemula yang serius ingin meniti karir pada bidang ilmu komputer. Penuh manfaat bagi programmer tingkat lanjut.

Sekilas pada awalnya anda mengira anda hanya akan belajar menggunakan alat untuk memrogram pada umumnya, namun ternyata anda diberi lebih, berupa pengalaman dan petunjuk-petunjuk yang penting bagi karir anda. Buku ini cukup ringkas sehingga tidak membosankan namun sangat padat berisi dan penuh manfaat.

Buku ini ditulis berdasarkan intisari dari pengalaman puluhan tahun penulis yang berprofesi sebagai ahli komputer sekaligus dokter medis. Anda seolah diajak berpetualang layaknya Lord of The Ring tetapi untuk buku teknis. Anda seolah turut mengalami peristiwa-peristiwa penting yang menjadi tonggak penting bangkitnya dunia Informatika dan Komputer. Sembari anda juga diajarkan dari dasar dengan bertahap langkah demi langkah dalam menguasai sebuah alat pemrogram yang akan anda gunakan sepanjang umur anda sebagai seorang programmer. Emacs sendiri adalah monster yang perkasa yang bilamana anda mampu menaklukannya maka anda akan menjadi pengendali monster tersebut dan mengandalkannya dalam perjalanan anda mengarungi belantara dunia pemrograman.

Namun bila anda benar-benar pemula dari nol, saya sarankan untuk memulai membaca buku "Learn Linux Shell Scripting-Fundamental of Bash 4.4" karya Sebastiaan Tamer [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...] terlebih dahulu baru kembali ke buku ini. Sehingga hasil yang didapatkan akan meningkat berkali lipat.

[Alex Linschoten · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent starting point. In some places a little bit too much enthusiasm when compared with content, but otherwise excellent. Seems Hahn's energy started to flag by the end, too, but by then you're figuring out things on your own.

[Łukasz Badura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good introduction to Emacs. I like the historical into to Unix system and tools to have a better context of why and how tools like Emacs were created. I also liked that the author focused on solid foundation of basic Emacs use before jumping into more high level features.

[Marc Blok · Rating 3 out of 5]

This introduction to emacs is well written and fun to read. At the end of the book it seems a little rushed. The quantity is a little bit a let down, much more can be covered. Now it still remains only an introduction.

[Russell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reasonably good overview of emacs, but done in a conversational style. As a result the book is verbose and not always the greatest teacher or reference.

More time could have been spent on how to customize emacs to your liking and emacs specific things like the kill-ring.

Take away: I like VIM better.