Re: learning Emacs Lisp

[Richard Riley]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> By the way, does anybody have any recommendations on the
>> best way to learn emacs lisp? I've got two books... the
>> emacs lisp manual and an old O'Reilly book called Writing
>> GNU Emacs Extensions by Bob Glickstein. It would be cool
>> if there were a course I could take in programming this
>> stuff... :-)
>
> [Please use plain text, not HTML, and please start a new thread for a new
> topic.]
>
> The Emacs Wiki has some help about this:
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LearningEmacs#LearnEmacsLisp
>
> I would also recommend this:
>
> Think of something simple that you would like to make Emacs do, and try to do
> it. In particular, try to modify some existing Lisp function or command in 
> some
> way that you're interested in.
>
> This will get you to look at how things are done in the existing code, which 
> is
> a great source for models. And the existing code works (!), so any departures
> you make from it can be compared when your changes don't do exactly what you
> expect.
>
> Another help is to get familiar with an Emacs-Lisp debugger - either edebug or
> the classic debugger (`debug-on-entry', put (debug) calls in your code, etc.).
> Likewise, functions `message', `sit-for', and `sleep-for' (for use with
> `message').

He's not popular with some on the more established Emacs users because
of his outspokenness on the some of the more newbie unfriendly aspects of
Emacs, but Xah Lee is an excellent resource with carefully argued points
and practical approach to, amongst other things, eLisp usage :-;

http://xahlee.org/emacs/elisp.html

It is a learn by doing approach and might work well for you

regards

Richard.