Book Review: GNU Emacs Manual, 20.7

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By Robert Nagle , Austin, TX, July 2002

Summary: Fantastic documentation, but missing important information about major modes

Note: Don't buy this book from retail booksellers! Amazon doesn't even sell the latest edition at the time of this writing. Buy directly from Free Software Foundation and support open source software.

One of my favorite technical books from a documentation standpoint is Richard Stallman's superior GNU Emacs Manual. The tool is justly famous and the manual is one of the best written and best organized books I'd ever seen. I've had problems at times figuring out how Emacs works, but when I came across an older edition of this book at a used bookstore, I realized that I simply had to have this book. I've found almost everything I wanted to know from this book and gotten a sense of how everything works. The manual also leaves me with a sense of how wonderfully extensible and versatile the program is. The book contains a glossary, a key index, a command and function index and a concept index. Wow! This is every technical writer's dream! I can generally find the answer to any question within a few seconds when consulting this manual (the help that comes with the program...well, that's another story). Keeping true to the GNU philosophy, Stallman makes the book (as well as a LISP reference guide) available for free at the gnu site.

So the good news is that the book is expertly written and organized. What's the bad news? First, the 14th edition (20.7) book doesn't include a discussion of how to use major modes of Emacs (such as PSGML) or the very handy PCL-CVS. Also, because emacs and xemacs have followed different development paths, Stallman's book doesn't cover the NT-based xemacs implementation. Love or hate xemacs, you have to appreciate the attempt at a GUI, especially when it comes to configuring the program. The package update functionality of Xemacs, could use better documentation as well.

In summary: a masterpiece of documentation, but the manual is sorely in need of a section discussing major mode and emacs.

GNU Emacs Manual, Version, 20.7,

June 2000

by Richard Stallman

Paperback - 542 pages

(June 2000)

Free Software Foundation

ISBN: 1882114078

Additional Thoughts

If the book is available for free on the Internet, what's the point of buying the dead tree version? Well, a lot. The emacs manual has several different indices and table of contents, plus the ability to bookmark spots. Most importantly, you can read it while reclining in a bed. I applaud the recent movement to offer books for free on the Net, and then to sell dead tree versions of them. Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java, has found his online version of the book only encouraged people to buy the hard cover. The Oreilly people, have offered portions of a book online and a few complete books (the most useful being perhaps Using Samba ). Open Source Projects such as Zope or Mysql have usually made their books available online, and only later have publishers stepped in to offer hard copies for sale. This is a superior system not only because it offers free documentation. It also allows readers to rely on the online version a bit before plunking out the money for the book. And here's the funny thing: I have ended up buying every online book I just mentioned. Perhaps the most humorous example is Phillip Greenspun's Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing Keenly aware of how quickly technology books go out of date, Greenspun interspersed talk about technology with favorite photographs so the book could still be used as a coffee table book. The thing with these kinds of books is that they just emerged out of the software project itself. Nowadays, with technology advancing in leaps and bounds, the best way to publish a book is to write a few how-to-essays until you have enough to make a book.