Re: Do we need a "Stevens" book?

[pjb@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)]

Olwe Melwasul <hercynianforest@gmail.com> writes:

> I've not gotten very far with this idea; no one seems interested, but
> I'll try it here anyway...
>
> It seems to me that Emacs needs a W. Richard Stevens-style book. As
> you may know, Stevens wrote the "Advanced Programming in the UNIX(R)
> Environment" textbook that many of us used in college. Or maybe Emacs
> needs something along the lines of the many "Linux gnarly/wooly
> internals" books. Anyway, I would love to see a book that got into the
> nitty-gritty of Emacs/elisp -- just like you see discussed here every
> day on the help-gnu-emacs list.
>
> Here's an example: comint. How do you effectively use comint? When
> should you use comint? Okay, I can Google around and find one-off blog
> discussions here and there about comint; I can read them all; I can
> get confused; I can kludge something together ... and then find out
> later that what I've done (as well as bloggers A, B, and C) is really
> not "best practice" use of comint, i.e., that how I've used comint is
> overkill or could have been done much simpler with <some other>.el.
> Wouldn't it be nice to have one go-to source/book that thrashed out
> comint usage once and for all?
>
> Just skimming through all the elisp material (books, Internet, etc.),
> it seems like a hodge-podge on a continuum between gems and junk just
> waiting for a clear-speaking Richard Stevens to whip it all into
> shape. Sure, the "official" texts will get you pretty far, but no way
> are you ready to be a "best-practices" guru. The printed books seem
> more like a "cookbook" than a real Stevens-style book. Maybe I'm all
> wrong, but I think I like what the Racket/PLT people are doing. They
> seem to be whipping the Scheme hodge-podge into a decent
> best-practices, best-tools order.
>
> Personally I've been admiring Emacs from afar for quite some time. I'm
> really an Emacs/elisp newbie, but I've got a writing/technical writing
> background. If what I'm saying strikes a chord, maybe I could be a
> receiver/collector of a "best-practices-slash-wooly internals" sorta
> book project. It would be a free/GNU sorta thing of course ... and
> please don't say "I don't think there'd be enough interest in it."


It could be an "Olwe Melwasul" book.  It would be interesting if you
could indeed make it pedagogical and compelling enough so that
more students want to use and learn emacs instead of vi.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/