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Books about Vim
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The full title of this book is:
"Learning the vi and Vim Editors: Power and Agility Beyond Just Text Editing".
Authors are Arnold Robbins and Elbert Hannah.
This is the eight edition of what started as "Learning the Vi editor".
Previous editions still explained a lot about other Vi clones, now Vim gets
most of the pages.
I have not yet had a chance to read this book. I assume it has been updated
for Vim 8.2, since that was the current version when it was published.
Parts II and III are specifically about Vim. The first part still has the
basic Vi features, applicable to all versions of Vi.
You can find the "Learning the Vi and Vim editors" book at the sites below. Buying
through these links will send a percentage to ICCF Holland. The
money is used to
help orphans in Uganda (see the home page).
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This is a recent book about Vim, written by Ruslan Osipov.
Besides introducing Vim commands, it gives a lot of attention to installing
and using plugins.
I have been reviewing this book and most parts are very useful. It stands
apart from other books in that it spends less time explaining all the Vim
commands and much more time on explaining what plugins are useful and how to
install them.
Although the copyright notice is very strict, I've been told that the examples
can be freely used and shared.
You can find the "Mastering Vim" book at the sites below. Buying through these
links will send a percentage to ICCF Holland. The money is used to
help orphans in Uganda (see the home page).
You can also get it directly from the publisher, Packt.
No percentage for Uganda though.
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This is a recent book about Vim, written by the same author as "Practical Vim": Drew Neil.
I have not read this book. Reviews mention that it's mostly about the plugins
that the author is using.
You can find the "Modern Vim" book at the sites below. Buying
through these
links will send a percentage to ICCF Holland. The money is used to
help orphans in Uganda (see the home page).
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This is a recent book about Vim, written by Jovica Ilic.
I have not read this book. Reviews on Amazon are mostly positive.
You can find the "Mastering Vim Quickly" book at the sites below. Buying
through these
links will send a percentage to ICCF Holland. The money is used to
help orphans in Uganda (see the home page).
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This is a recent book about Vim.
Drew Neil is the author.
As the title suggests, this is a very practical, task centric book.
This is a list of 123 tips, some very simple and some complicated. Each tip is
verbosely explained, so that you can easily apply it to similar tasks and
learn how Vim works by example. The text quality is consistently high, which
sets it apart from online tip collections.
Although the book is copyrighted, I have been told the code examples can be
shared, with some restrictions.
You can find the "Practical Vim" book at the sites below. Buying through these
links will send a percentage to ICCF Holland. The money is used to
help orphans in Uganda (see the home page).
You can also buy Practical Vim direct from the publisher as an ebook, DRM-free
in pdf, epub and mobi formats
here.
No percentage for Uganda though.
There is also a Japanese translation of the first edition. You can find it online
here.
And you can find it on Amazon Japan.
No percentage for Uganda though.
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This book was written by Mark McDonnell.
I have not read this book. Reviews on Amazon are mixed, check them out.
You can find the "Pro Vim" book at the sites below. Buying through these
links will send a percentage to ICCF Holland. The money is used to
help orphans in Uganda (see the home page).
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This is a book about the Vim script language.
Benjamin Klein is the author.
I have not had a chance to read this book.
Note that the term "Vim script" is preferred, "VimL" is not a good name.
You can find "The VimL Primer" book at the sites below. Buying through these
links will send a percentage to ICCF Holland. The money is used to
help orphans in Uganda (see the home page).
You can also get the book
directly from the publisher, also in Ebook format.
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This book was written bij Kim Schulz.
This book was written after Vim 7.2 was released, thus it includes all the new
features, such as spell checking and omni-completion. If you want to read
about the latest features there is no other Vim book to chose from.
This book is task oriented. It contains sections on various things you would
want to use Vim for. Some are short, such as the section about line numbers.
Some are quite long, such as the section on script structure. Basically Kim
puts the things together that you need to know to get something done, and
doesn't try to explain every detail (you can find that in the online help).
The book is aimed at people who use Vim for a little while and know the
basics. You can use the tasks to make your editing more efficient and learn
about all the important features that Vim offers.
The publisher has a
sample chapter available (PDF).
One of the things that indicate the care with which this book was written, is
that every feature is marked with the version of Vim that it requires. Thus
if you read the part about spell checking you can see you need Vim 7 for this.
The publisher will give part of the turnover to help children in Uganda. See
the page on the publisher site about this.
You can find the "Hacking Vim" book at the sites below. Buying through these
links will send a percentage to ICCF Holland. The money is used to
help orphans in Uganda (see the home page).
You can also get the book
directly from the Hacking Vim book publisher
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The Vim book by Steve Oualline was the first book to be completely
dedicated to Vim, the text editor.
I can recommend this book especially for beginners and those who use Vim for a
short while and would like to learn more.
The most often used commands are explained with many figures and examples.
Steve has a writing style that is very easy to read.
Advanced Vim users will find many hints for useful features.
The more advanced items are not explained in detail though.
The foreword is great! Well, I wrote it...
I also reviewed the text, hopefully all mistakes have been corrected.
There are appendices that list all the commands and options.
At the end there is a quick reference for the most often used commands.
The text was written for Vim version 5.7.
The book has been published in April 2001. It is about 600 pages.
The information from the publisher is gone now...
Look at the Amazon site for more info, see below.
The book is available online as a PDF
here.
I have started an unofficial errata list. You can find it
here
You can find the Vim book at the sites below. Buying through these links will
send a percentage to ICCF Holland. The money is used to help orphans
in Uganda (see the
home page).
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This is a small sized book, but its 350 pages contain lots of useful
information. Currently only available in German.
Now at the third edition and updated for Vim 7, thus it also explains
things like exception handling ("Ausnahmebehandlung"). The book was first
published April 2004, 3rd edition in November 2007.
Lots of tables and examples that make it easy to read.
The author has added a lot of useful tips.
You can either find the section that explains the thing you want to do, or read
it from start to end and encounter things you never thought about looking for.
Compared to the "big" Vim book by Steve Oualline this is more a reference guide
than a tutorial. Explanations for the more advanced features are explained
better, there is less text for a first-time Vim user.
It's about a third of the price.
If you buy the book using the link below a percentage goes to
Uganda to help needy children.
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Another book that is useful when working with Vim is the O'Reilly book
Mastering Regular Expressions. Although it doesn't explicitly mention
Vim regular expressions, it explains the basics and mechanisms very well. The
slightly different syntax of Vim patterns can then be found in the Vim help
files.
This is the best study book for regular expressions available.
If you buy the book using one of the links below a percentage goes to
Uganda to help needy children.
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