Re: Is there any good website for emacs newbie?

[Tyler Smith <tyler.smith@mail.mcgill.ca>]

On 2007-05-04, Sebastian Tennant <sebyte@smolny.plus.com> wrote:
>
> I don't know where in the world you are, or if you already have a
> book, but I could send you my old "Learning GNU Emacs (2nd Edition)",
> published by O'Reily, if you like?
>

Take him up on that offer! That's a great book. I learned Emacs (or at
least, started to learn) using three important resources:

1 - the online tutorial. It's a bit imposing for a rank beginner, but
it introduces all the basics in about an hour

2- the oreilly book. More thorough discussions of the most common
tools, a good follow-on from the tutorial.

3- the official docs. I bought hardcopies of the GNU Emacs manual and
learning emacs lisp. A little too comprehensive and terse at first, but
once you've worked through some of the o'reilly book and used Emacs a
bit, they are chock-full of useful details. They are available free as
part of Emacs too.

The most important thing is not to worry about learning everything at
once. I started off with the basics, just kill (C-k), yank (C-y), and
save-file (C-x C-s). Whenever I find myself doing anything over and
over again, I look up the function to automate it. That way it's easy
to remember stuff, as you're always learning something that's
immediately and repeatedly useful.


Cheers,

Tyler