Rating: 

My intrest in Emacs was as a programer, and this book failed me totaly. The section on programing is 10 pages long. If you want to use emacs to code, just look for the info on the net. There isn't anything in this book that you couldn't find in a student essay on using emacs as a programing tool.

I find this book to be much to long getting to the point. The material covered in the frist five chapters is covered in the free tutorial included with emacs. 120 pages to explain what the sentence "Open emacs, press Ctrl-h t and read the tutorial."

I think that the writers (yes, it took 3 people) of this book thought that people might want to use emacs for word processing, and I think the writer was paid by the page, not the project, hence the 500 page book.

To the editors I say: Trim about 200 pages off this one. Emacs is full of features, but lots of them are useless and exotic. Try to make the next edition of this book more like your book on bash (shell).

To people wanting this book I say: forget it. Your throwing your cash away. Do a search on Google, this book dosn't deliver. I would take mine back to the store, but I pulled out the little 'hint' card in the back, so they wont take it back.