learning Emacs Lisp [was: Grouping related buffers]

[Drew Adams]

> 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... :-)

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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').