After a few months of waiting (and me studying the preview), Mickey Petersen’s book “Mastering Emacs” is finally out. I have to say that I anticipated it a lot, and I do like it, too! I’m probably not exactly in the target audience – the book covers mostly basics of Emacs usage – but I still learned a few things from it. The book is quite large (270+ pages), very nicely typeset in LaTeX, and full of good advice on using Emacs. After the introductory part there are chapters devoted to point movement, editing (including some more intermediate topics, like keyboard macros or abbreviations), and “Practicals of Emacs”. This last chapter (well, one but last, but the real last one is a final advice and a short reading list) is an umbrella for a few topics which seemingly didn’t fit elsewhere (and are important enough to include them), like asking Emacs or using tools like TRAMP, Dired or eshell.
All in all, let me say it again: I like the book a lot. Even though I myself learned Emacs (mainly) from the (excellent) manual, not everyone has the time and dedication to do it; in such a case, Mickey’s book is an excellent resource. Head to https://www.masteringemacs.org/ for more details. (Last note: the book is available as a pdf or epub file; I read only the pdf.)