I bought this book with great expectations of learning Emacs. However, I was EXTREMELY disappointed with it. I can't tell you what a terrible book this is. But I'll try. The chapter on installing Emacs on a Windows platform refers to a nonexistent section in an appendix. Hence, you are left in the dark on how to perform this installation. If that wasn't bad enough, some of the files that the author talks about throughout the book have been omitted from the CD (mostly .el files). The WORST part about this book is probably the fact that it doesn't even mention the website where corrections are shown, and the website is extremely difficult to find while surfing the web. He doesn't seem in the least bit apologetic that this disaster is riddled with errors. He acts as if the printing errors were completely natural in every way. The thought of this book infuriates me. The only thing that might have been of use in this book was the section on installing NT Emacs, but since this was omitted, you may as well just forego buying the book and read this on the author's website. Do yourself a favour and miss this one completely; It should be retitled, "Learn how to bang your head against the wall in frustration in 24 minutes." Instead, run out and buy a copy of Learning GNU Emacs by O'Reilly & Associates. Although that book doesn't cover Emacs installation, you should be able to accomplish that via online instructions. It is an infinitely better book; trust me.

This is good beginner book for anyone who is un-initiated to the world of Emacs. Since this book is in a tutorial format like other Sams Teach Yourself books, one can read through this book pretty fast and get up and running using the power of Emacs very quickly. The author does a good job of introducing the reader to many of the powerful functions of emacs and also contantly mentions ways to customize the various functions.
One of the sources of irritation while reading the book is that the author refers too many times to the libraries on the CD rather than the generic functions available in Emacs itself. However, this does get the reader accustomed to the idea of customizing Emacs, which is what makes Emacs such a powerful editor. There is also a introductory chapter on Lisp, which should suffice most beginners.

The word on the street is that EMACS is tough to get in touch with. The book 'Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours' proves that word wrong; it's really not that hard. Coming from the MS-Windows world, one has been used to easy-to-use editors - though not that efficient, due to the limited use of shortcut keys. My very first use of this book was as a how-to-do tutorial. A swift look in the appendix, and I was able to cut, copy, paste and navigate the source like I had never done anything else. When getting curious to learn the more advanced features of the editor, it was necessary to read the book chapter by chapter, but the way it's written makes this quite easy. For each feature mentioned, the writer does a great job explaining the differences between the GNU-Emacs, XEmacs and Emacs for WIN32. In my opinion, this book is definitely one of the better ones. The only issue lacking is how to get the best from Emacs when not using X.