Emacs and Religion (humorous Amazon search result)

[water]

water again.

I knew this subject is an old religious war among coders, and knew asking about an IDE on PM would bring back the customary answers, but decided to ask anyway......

And now after some reflection I am considering going back to emacs after all these years........

And so I headed over to Amazon to find a good book on Emacs for my reintroduction........

And, I am not making this up, a search for 'emacs' on AMZN turned up, off all things, the Holy Bible (!)

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 • Excerpt from page 1039 "... on the cheek, "Matthew, and Thomas, and
+ James the 17'[ eMac',Mat offer the other also, and from one who and 
+Simon ..."
See more references to emacs in this book.

A religious war, indeed!
<g>

[doom]

And alt.religion.emacs remains a good newsgroup to learn about emacs... but only if you're willing to embrace the faith.

As far as books about emacs, the two I would suggest are:

• GNU Emacs Manual by Richard M. Stallman
• An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp by Robert J. Chassell
Both of these are available through the earthly conduit of the holy fire, gnu.org. Also, as is their wont, the full texts of these books ship with emacs, along with the full Gnu Emacs Lisp Reference Manual itself: Try ESC x help i and look down the list.

The O'Reilly book Learning GNU Emacs, Second Edition might be okay, if you could find a copy (it's been out of print for ten years). Their "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" by Bob Glickstein was also pretty good, but I think it's been out of print even longer. (It could be that O'Reilly has essentially moved on from being the uber-geek's book company... maybe it's time for Apress to do some emacs books?)

Don't forget to check the emacs wiki page: PerlLanguage.

Thou powers known to but a few, thou public API widely advertised.