I’m working on a book that should serve the same purpose as this series of screencasts but for an audience that prefers reading rather than watching screencasts.

This whole project is as much for my own education as it is to spread the word. It is also a “work in progress”. Once I upload a video, it’s unlikely that I’ll “fix” any mistakes in it. I’ll update errata in the blog post but will not redo the video. However, the book will undergo changes repeatedly till I’m satisfied. I also hope that the quality of the videos will improve over time.

The book is tentatively titles “Emacs : A programmers editor” and my plan is to break it down into four parts.

Part 1 will dvelve on basics like terminology, navigation, basic customisation etc. Part 2 on “applications” which are things which you can use Emacs for like keeping your diary, editing directories, as a PIM, as a shell etc. Part 3 is going to be where I talk about programmers and things which benefit them. I’ll dive into a few of the popular major modes and also into things like version control integration etc. Finally, part 4 is going to focus on elisp and how to make Emacs do your bidding.

I haven’t finalised where and how I’m going to release or put up the book. Right now, my plan is to put the book in the /book subdirectory with some kind of an index but this is tentative so don’t rely on the URLs being permanent.

With that, here is the introductory chapter.

Feedback is welcome and you can email me at .