What alternatives to the usual manuals are there to learn Emacs?...
especially for new learners who have difficulties with the
deficiencies in the usual manual texts and jargon.

Not all potential new users see themselves as a part of our community!

Don Saklad wrote:

I started by using the menus.

-- Mike Treseler

Good suggestion - forgot that one. Menu organization is a great way to discover
features - things that belong together are typically grouped together.

BTW, Icicles can help you to learn Emacs, in several ways.
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsNewbieWithIcicles

One way is by letting you match menu substrings. That can help you find things
in the menu hierarchy and discover what the hierarchy looks like.
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/IciclesMenu

How about the rms-written tutorial:

C-h t

David

On May 11, 5:47 pm, Don Saklad gnu.org> wrote:

you might try my tutorial.
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs.html

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

Some personal experineces on emacs tutorial...

i started to use emacs in 1998. Was a full time user and beta tester
for BBEdit for several years before that.

The first tutorial i read is the bundled tutorial (C-h t, M-x help-
with-tutorial).

This tutorial is the way to get you started with emacs from the ground
up. It in written in 1980's mindset, gets you started to learn all the
emacs ways and terminologies. It is not a practicality oriented one
though.

Once you've read the bundled tutorial, you'll know about info (C-h i)
and how to use its navigation shorcuts, which you can read the whole
one-thousand pages of emacs manual. The emacs manual is a bit...

Xah gmail.com> writes:

The latest edition is actually the third edition, published in 2004.
It's excellent.

I started with the built-in tutorial, and I agree with Xah's assessment.
It's the best point of entry. Following that, I read the O'Reilly book,
which is very accessible and provides lots of good practical advice.
After working through the most relevant parts of that book, I was
well-enough prepared to make efficient use of the Emacs manual. Again, I
agree with Xah that the manual is well written and comprehensive, but
there are dark corners that need some work.

Xah gmail.com> writes:

[The Emacs tutorial was] written in 1980's mindset [...]
It is not [...] practicality oriented[.]

Can you explain exactly what that means? I live in the
2000's and, though it's been a few years since I went
through the tutorial, I don't recall reading anything that
did not seem clearly focused on the specific and practical
realities of how to use the Emacs editor. Or is your
criticism really of Emacs itself?

The emacs manual is a bit quaint in today, but it is
very well written and complete. It is systematic, topics
well organized, jargons are well defined and has several
comprehensive index, the writing is clear, is well
cross-linked.[...] The writing quality and content of
emacs manual, is far better than most OpenSource docs
such as perl, python, apache, unix man.

Hi Evans,

Evans Winner timbral.net> wrote:

Xah wrote: