Hacking Vim by Kim Schulz, a book truly suited for the average Vim user looking to find his or her way into the advanced and wonderful world of Vim. From basic customization to fully advanced scripting, this book has it all.

To begin the book shows you what I consider to be the most important part of Vim, making it pretty! Of course in the process it also outlines a number of useful tips in order to increase usability and productivity. The book also devotes what seems like a small chapter on GVim, Vim's GUI counterpart, and some of the more advanced menu options it has available. Although this chapter didn't appeal to me directly it wasn't so intrusive that it actually got in the way, just skip a few pages and we're back to hacking the core of Vim again.

The book continues by showing you a better way to navigate Vim, faster searching, multiple files. It introduces you to the tabbing features of Vim and how to use them effectively. From this point the book takes a bit of a turn and begins to focus more so on using Vim while in a programming environment, specifically C/C++. Many of the tips given could be easily applied to other languages, Perl, Ruby, etc., however specific examples do not exist which at times can make some of the concepts being taught a little tricker to follow.

The final chapter of the book goes into the Vim scripting language and the power and versatility it has. In fact the final chapter could be expanded into a new book and still only begin to scratch the surface. Luckily, just like Hacking Vim itself the scripting chapter starts off by showing you how to set up your scripting environment effectively and then moves you through the syntax of the language. The book finishes on a high note by showing a handful of "useless" yet important Vim scripted games that show the full capabilities of the Vim scripting language.

All in all this book showed me the parts of Vim that I had only previously heard about but never understood. This book has showed me a number of improvements for my own .vimrc as well as how to use Vim effectively when handling any task. In fact this very review was written in Vim, something I never would have done before reading this book, spell checking and all.