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Learning the vi Editor (6th Edition) Review by calvinnme
The best book for properly learning the vi editor
If your operating system is down, you don't have access to the "fancier" editors available that actually have interfaces that make sense to normal people. At this moment, particularly if you are in a system administrator position, you must know vi in order to access and modify files. It is so easy to pick up vi the wrong way - usually by word of mouth from someone who has learned vi the wrong way too. This book is the best I've found that is dedicated to properly teaching you the features of the vi editor and how to use them. O'Reilly has experimented with several book formats over the last ten years. This book is what I like to call "classic O'Reilly". It is the same format that most of their other books on Unix tools are generally written in, and if you have their books on sed and awk or Unix Power Tools, you know what I'm talking about.
If you have learned the wrong way, or if you are a bonified beginner, start at the beginning of part one. Don't skip anything. Even if you think you already know something, at least read through the section to make sure you know the best way of doing it. By the end of the first seven chapters you should be a pretty skilled user of vi. The book makes frequent use of practice exercises, answers common questions, and gives advice on what to do when you encounter common problems. By the time you finish you'll even be writing ex scripts and modifying C/C++ code in the vi editor without accidentally inserting all kinds of control characters that will drive programmers crazy once "the real editor" is back on line.
Part two starts at chapter eight and concerns itself with all of the various extensions to vi that are available via the four most popular vi clones available when this book was published. You do get some enhancements such as multi-window editing and even GUI interfaces by using them, but the cost is an increase in the confusion factor that this book tries to clear up as much as possible. If you are not planning on using a vi clone, you may want to just file this section of the book away in case the subject ever comes up.
Part 3 consists of several useful appendices. Four of the appendices are still useful, but the fifth, on vi and the Internet, is a bit dated. I highly recommend this book if the vi editor is in your future, and if you have system administrator duties, believe me it is. You might also want to invest in the very handy "vi Editor Pocket Reference" by the same author. I have mixed feelings about that one. Everything is there in a concise format, but until you get used to it, information can be hard to find.