This is a high-quality, hardbound edition of the official GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, from the current Emacs Version 24.5 distribution. It is printed on acid free and lignin free paper, that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper. *** The GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual is also available for free within GNU Emacs itself, via the help system, or online. Professional users may find this hardbound edition convenient for frequent consultation, and an excellent copy for desktop reference. *** For each copy of this manual sold, 10% of its gross sale revenue is donated to the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Most of the GNU Emacs text editor is written in the programming language called Emacs Lisp. You can write new code in Emacs Lisp and install it as an extension to the editor. However, Emacs Lisp is more than a mere "extension language"; it is a full computer programming language in its own right. You can use it as you would any other programming language. Because Emacs Lisp is designed for use in an editor, it has special features for scanning and parsing text as well as features for handling files, buffers, displays, subprocesses, and so on. Emacs Lisp is closely integrated with the editing facilities; thus, editing commands are functions that can also conveniently be called from Lisp programs, and parameters for customization are ordinary Lisp variables. This manual attempts to be a full description of Emacs Lisp. For a beginner's introduction to Emacs Lisp, see An Introduction to Emacs Lisp Programming, by Bob Chassell, also published by the Free Software Foundation. This manual presumes considerable familiarity with the use of Emacs for editing; see The GNU Emacs Manual for this basic information. Generally speaking, the earlier chapters describe features of Emacs Lisp that have counterparts in many programming languages, and later chapters describe features that are peculiar to Emacs Lisp or relate specifically to editing. This is the GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, corresponding to Emacs version 24.5. As Emacs Lisp became such a big project over the years, we had to split this reference manual in two parts that are two separate physical books. To keep it consistent with our digital manual, the references and page numbers cover both physical books as it were one. Therefore please note that you probably want to have both parts.

Most of the GNU Emacs integrated environment is written in the programming language called Emacs Lisp. The code written in this programming language is the software (the sets of instructions) that tell the computer what to do when you give it commands. Emacs is designed so that you can write new code in Emacs Lisp and easily install it as an extension to the editor. This introduction to Emacs Lisp is designed to get you started: to guide you in learning the fundamentals of programming, and more importantly, to show you how you can teach yourself to go further. This manual is available online for free at gnu.org. This manual is printed in grayscale.

"This book introduces Emacs Lisp and tells you how to make the editor do whatever you want, whether it's altering the way text scrolls or inventing a whole new "major mode." Topics progress from simple to complex, from lists, symbols, and keyboard commands to syntax tables, macro templates, and error recovery"--Resource description page.