Vim and Vi Tips: Essential Vim and Vi Editor Skills, free on Amazon today only

'available'. It is listed, but they do not sell it to everybody: "Due to copyright restrictions, the Kindle title you're trying to purchase is not available in your country: Netherlands"

(amazon.nl links through to amazon.co.uk)

Amazon.de also does not sell it to everybody: "Aufgrund urheberrechtlicher Bestimmungen ist der Kindle-Titel, den Sie kaufen möchten, in Ihrem Land nicht verfügbar: Niederlande"

dspillett• 14 years ago

For those without a Kindle, remember that Kindle editions like this can be read using the PC or iDevice clients.

myko• 14 years ago

Android as well.

brown9-23• 14 years ago

Or Mac, or "Cloud Reader" through your web browser.

dhimes• 14 years ago

+1 for cloud reader for programming books. It's open in one window, code in another, terminal in another. Drawbacks, however, include (1) is you can't copy-and-paste from the book; and (2) links don't work [which makes drawback (1) very annoying].

flux_w42• 14 years ago

Amazon provides also a chrome plugin for PC

john2x• 14 years ago

How do I download the book so I can read it on my iDevice?

JeremyBanks2• 14 years ago

Officially, you need to use the Kindle app.

Unofficially, it's easy to use Calibre to convert them to epub. (DRM add a few minutes of extra work.)

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

And on Linux?

officemonkey• 14 years ago

There's also a client for the Blackberry.

It sucks, but it'll do in a pinch.

sudonim2• 14 years ago

Awesome. Thanks for sharing. I've been using vim for 6 months, but I still feel like a n00b. Looking forward to checking this out.

I started my vim experience using Janus

But I didn't understand how anything worked or why any of the plugins were there.

That led me to starting from scratch (I forked my cofounder's dotfiles) and now I feel like I know my vim config waaaay better. If you've been using janus, I'd highly recommend giving the ground up strategy a shot.

https://github.com/sud0n1m/dotfiles

yesbabyyes• 14 years ago

Keep at it, I've been using vim for 15 years and I also still feel like a noob.

jebblue2• 14 years ago

I've been using it for about 17 years and I too am a noob. hjkl

SeanDav• 14 years ago

not sure if that says bad things about Vim or good...

mikegirouard• 14 years ago

I wound up doing the same thing (not with Janus, but with a massive forked .vimrc).

One day I was SSH'd into a remote server and vim'd a directory by accident and I discovered Netrw. It wasn't the same as NERDTree, but it was good enough for me to get rid of that plugin. Eventually I just learned to enjoy the defaults with minor tweaks. Today my vimrc[1] is < 200 lines, mostly comments and navigation shortcuts.

[1] https://github.com/mgirouard/Dots/blob/master/.vimrc

dkersten• 14 years ago

I used NERDTree for a long time until I saw a simple tutorial to netrw - now I love netrw and don't want to ever go back to NERDTree. It's simple and to the point and just works really well for me.

gbog• 14 years ago

Nice, I have a bit more (eg Pyflakes highlighting, Pysmell completion) but I share the same trend: barebone vim (no gui, no mouse, no pathogen infection).

I was looking for the rightbelow this, found it in your vimrc. Found it weird you don't have wildmenu...

tolos• 14 years ago

What is this netrw? http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1075 seems to imply it's just for vim'ing remote files. Does it do more?

xqyz3• 14 years ago

I'm also pretty new to vim (well at least using it seriously, for a quick config edit I've been using it for ages as it beats having to use nano).

I love reading other people's vimrc as I usually always find something new that I'm willing to try out. Mine is here in case someone wants to take a look: https://github.com/PatrickLerner/dotfiles/blob/master/vimrc

czzarr• 14 years ago

I'm in the opposite boat: i stuck with Janus and actually dug in the source and played with it to understand exactly what was there. Janus is incredibly awesome and easy to extend, I'd highly recommend you gave it another chance and really read the docs and try to understand why it is what it is. Must have plugins are also https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround and https://github.com/tpope/vim-repeat

nikcub2• 14 years ago

you always feel like a n00b with vim :)

wyclif• 14 years ago

I didn't use Janus, but I copied a really good, commented .vimrc from another Python and Ruby programmer. That was a mistake, but I didn't realise it at first because I thought "this does a lot of neat things that I need" but I had no idea what was really going on or how it was different from the default. So I did the same thing you did. Deleted it and started with blank dotfiles and no plugins.

I figured out that when you're in the learning stage with vim, you should always be editing your dotfiles because that's a big part of progressing up the learning curve.

swagatata• 14 years ago

thanks

codegeek• 14 years ago

perfect. Just ordered on my Kindle for PC. I hae always been a fan of vi but more recently started using vim. Lot of expectations from this book!!

darkstalker• 14 years ago

Kindle edition has DRM, right?

ihuman• 14 years ago

Yes, but it's possible to get rid of it

yitchelle• 14 years ago

Awesome! Thanks for sharing

1007• 14 years ago

Any way to download and read this on linux ?

vilgax2• 14 years ago

Don't know about download but you can read it online using Amazon Cloudreader.

acomar• 14 years ago

Download is easy enough, just click the transfer via usb option, and it'll download a .azw file. You can't read it without stripping out the DRM first, but that's not very hard either.

daviddaviddavid• 14 years ago

Once every six months something inspires me to put a book on the Kindle that I received as a Christmas present two years ago. Then the frustrations begin. In this case, after finding the table of contents I try to use the up-down-joystick-button to navigate the TOC. It's just painfully slow and it's displaying definitions for every word I happen to be on (it starts off showing me the definition for "Table" in Table of Contents). The lag between pressing the button and the cursor actually moving is too frustrating for me to even use the damn device.

Perhaps the "two years old" is my problem and I just need a newer device but, boy, I just can't get myself to use this thing with any consistency.

xqyz3• 14 years ago

You could try the kindle app for your computer/phone/tablet. I like reading books on my iPhone on my daily commute and it's quite nice (except for some technical books where the source code formatting is obviously quite bad with the small screen).

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

I have the current Kindle with joystick-button and although moving the cursor about isn't exactly smooth it moves quickly. The definition thing can be annoying.

brown9-23• 14 years ago

Have you ever made it past the table of contents on the Kindle?

I find the reading experience is quite smooth. Navigation and the UI is a bit slow, but that is a secondary feature to me.

bajsejohannes• 14 years ago

I read almost twice as many books since I got my kindle for Christmas last year. I even prefer reading on the kindle to reading on a pc/tablet or a traditional book.

That said, for reference books, it's worse than the alternatives. I almost exclusively use it for reading books back-to-back (i.e. relying very little on the arrow keys)

sswezey• 14 years ago

I completely agree.

Kindle is great for cover-to-cover reading, but for reference I will always prefer dead-tree (but will settle for searchable pdfs)

DennisP• 14 years ago

You might like the Kindle Touch better. Just touch the entry you want.

shreeshga• 14 years ago

Good book.. but for those new to VIM :-/ From the title, i thought it would have some pro tips and tricks.

chris_wot6• 14 years ago

Try the interactive vim tutorial - http://www.openvim.com/tutorial.html

chris_wot6• 14 years ago

I once tried (and succeeded!) at purchasing the Dragon Book for Kindle, but had to change to a US address. I bought the book, bu then Amazon wanted me to verify I had moved to the U.S.

I never bought another book from Amazon ever again.

o1iver• 14 years ago

Why? It's not Amazon's fault, but rather the decision of the publisher... And I guess it's your loss anyway. I had the same problem (I have to use amazon.de), but hey, better that than nothing!

chris_wot6• 14 years ago

Actually, if you sign up for a U.S. account with a plausible address, then there is really nothing that would stop you from buying an ebook from the U.S.

They wonder why folks pirate. I paid for that book, I would feel well within my rights to find a copy of the book in PDF format (non-DRM encoded) and use that instead. I haven't done that - but there you have it. I paid for a book, I didn't get a refund of about $100 and I can no longer read the book. They stole from me.

artursapek• 14 years ago

Well, this just got me to download Amazon's Kindle apps.

Simucal• 14 years ago

The Kindle app on my phone has increased the amount I read so much. I find all these random times throughout the day where I can read another chapter in whatever book I'm reading.

Waiting for a meeting to start or standing in line? I'll read the next dozen pages in my Clojure book or the latest fiction novel I'm working on.

When I first started reading on my phone I thought the bright display and small screen would bother me. It hasn't. I've read huge novels on my phone flipping small page after small page. If anything, I feel like I read faster.

austinlyons• 14 years ago

Vim is one of those tools that I shied away from because of the steep learning curve. A co-worker convinced me to give it a try, and now I use Vim everyday. I'm constantly discovering useful commands and tricks. Looking forward to learning more from this free book - thanks Amazon.

sigkill2• 14 years ago

I just bought it using the button "Buy it with 1-Click" and I found it a bit scary. I mean, no confirmation and all. It's like just click and, BOOM, a confirmation email saying that you've already bought it. It's quite jarring as compared to buying stuff from other websites.

rotation1• 14 years ago

Yes it's almost surprising the first few times you do it. I find myself thinking "wait, which card did that just go on?"

You can get a refund within 7 days though if you do click by accident.

sigkill2• 14 years ago

Oh, thank god for that. Generally I've lived without an Amazon account because they don't work outside the US. But this one, combined with the post that helped generate fake US addresses pushed me to do it.

Actually, now I'm pretty sure why Amazon would be upset when someone else copies their one-click patent. And the sneaky thing is, when you create a new account it's on by default!

jamesbritt2• 14 years ago

On a related note, is there an easy way to find other free or dirt-cheap (US $0.99) E-books on Amazon?

The Amazon site likes to group things into "As low as <price>" sections, which means there's a least one item at that price, with most things costing more.

kroger• 14 years ago

One way is to go to the kindle store, choose the kind of book you want (Amazon calls it a "Department") and sort by price. For instance, here are programming books:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st?bbn=726697011&qid=1345...

It's not perfect but you can find good deals this way.

jamesbritt2• 14 years ago

Oh, fantastic. Thanks.

jojomnky• 14 years ago

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth but my TL;DR assessment of the first few pages makes me think this book is pretty poorly edited. None the less I'm looking forward to reading it and honing my vim skillset.

pseudonym2• 14 years ago

Every once in awhile the state of DRM really hammers itself home, to me.

Case in point, when someone is literally giving a potentially interesting book away and I can't be arsed to take it because getting it onto my reader of choice is just too much hassle.

robertpateii• 14 years ago

you can't convert it with calibre?

vvnraman• 14 years ago

No. You need to own a Kindle whose serial no. is used by Calibre to convert to any other format.

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

Yep.

More irony is ironic: there's no Kindle reader for Linux, which is one of the platforms on which vi/vim are most likely to be found.

Thanks for nothing, Amazon.

nuclear_eclipse• 14 years ago

The Kindle Cloud Reader works just fine for me on Linux (Chromium)...

tomku2• 14 years ago

Thanks, downloaded and read through it and I picked up a couple new tricks, even as a pretty experienced Vim user.

Some comments:

1) The order feels a little artificial. I like that inserting text isn't mentioned until a couple chapters in, but I think that the focus on saving/writing files at the start is misplaced. If I'm a newbie and I don't know how to change or insert text, I don't have the ability to meaningfully practice saving as I read.

2) There are some weird inconsistencies, like teaching :next (:n) for next file, but Ctrl+^ for previous file. :Next (:N) is easier to remember, works in vi and is shorter to type than the less-compatible :prev that I would otherwise suggest. :! is mentioned several times in different contexts, without a hint that it's the same command in each but with a different prefix or argument.

3) There's a focus on memorization of compound commands rather than understanding how motions and operators work. If you know how the cursor works and that "y" means "yank from cursor", you don't have to remember that "yl" means "yank a single character" because you can compose it from "yank from cursor" and "one character to the right". This composition of movement and operators is one of vi's greatest strengths, and I think that exposing new vi users to it as early as practically possible is a great way to get them to appreciate what they're learning.

All in all, it's a worthy read for someone who doesn't know any vi and needs a quick lesson in the basics, somewhat like the foreign language learning products that focus on teaching you enough conversational vocabulary for a vacation or business trip. If you want to immigrate to vi-land permanently, I'd suggest supplementing this with something like Drew Neil's "Practical Vim"[1] to learn the "bigger picture" stuff as well.

[1] http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim

slurgfest2• 14 years ago

Pretty nice review and I agree with most of your comments.

I agree that it seems strange to teach Ctrl+^ for previous file. (Not symmetrical, and doesn't really mean previous anyway.) However, particularly for the purpose of teaching newbies, I think :Next would be even more confusing... and I could be wrong about this, but I think the number of people who need to care about learning vi (as opposed to vim) is really small, if it even extends beyond communities of people who think that things created 20 years ago are newfangled.

tomku2• 14 years ago

I agree about the vi vs. vim part, I just suggested :N since the book itself was (as far as I could tell) strictly staying vi-compatible. :Next going backwards compared to :next is a little confusing at first, but it actually fits the same pattern as some other commands that go in two directions (f and F, t and T, gg and G), if you think about the two commands as just :n and :N. Naturally, as you observed, it's probably better to use :prev if you're in a modern vi clone or vim.

If you switch to vim as the baseline, there's a bunch of other easier ways to do things too, like using :sav (:saveas) instead of :w <filename> followed by :e <filename>.

johncoltrane2• 14 years ago

I've been using Vim for almost 2 years, now, and I'm very happy with it. Somehow, I'd like to try vi but I have no idea of where I could find the source.

grannyg00se• 14 years ago

Not free exactly. It's still locked in the kindle cage. You can't just download it as a PDF.

giftedmunchkin4• 14 years ago

Free as in beer, not free as in freedom.

dllthomas2• 14 years ago

Free as in beer if you've paid for the glass.

atsaloli2• 14 years ago

If you'd like to make sure you know all your vi basics, I recommend my presentation "Vi Basics" at http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi/class/ -- it is based on Bill Joy's original paper introducting vi and covers the basics of vi according to its author and in the same order that the author covered them.

dasil003• 14 years ago

Very cool, thanks.

atsaloli2• 14 years ago

My pleasure, you're welcome!

stefek99• 14 years ago

Just saying: need to use VPN to have it.

mappu• 14 years ago

I understand you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover - but a Vim book that has Visual Basic on the cover (legacy VB6 no less) seems like a big, big warning sign.

ck2• 14 years ago

I feel like a wimp for liking nano (pico)

Vi reminds me of the crazy-old wordstar days.

surfingdino2• 14 years ago

Guys, thanks for all your comments. This book has been in print since 2008 and I have never received so many useful feedback. I have already prepared an update for it, but it's currently being blocked by Amazon. I hope to solve that problem this week.

surfingdino2• 14 years ago

Just a quick update for you guys. The second updated edition is already available so please follow the Amazon procedures outlined in the email they'll send you to get it. If you missed the second edition free promo, you can get the third edition at http://TheVimBook.com Thanks!

Vim and Vi Tips: Essential Vim and Vi Editor Skills, free on Amazon today only

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