Professional SlickEdit (Programmer to Programmer)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 472 pages
• Published by: Wrox November 5, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0470122153
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0470122150
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 1.7 pounds

Product Description
Professional SlickEditis the first guide to the award-winning SlickEdit tools, and is technically reviewed by the SlickEdit development team. SlickEdit expert John Hurst shares his years of experience in developing with SlickEdit to teach readers how to maximize the tool’s features, and to write and debug code faster than they have before. Additionally, the book includes a CD ROM with an extended trial version of SlickEdit not available anywhere else.

Professional SlickEdit is heavy on examples, making this a hands-on guide that will get readers up and running with the tools quickly. Topics include:

• Customizing the environment
• Staying organized with Workspaces and Projects
• Understanding Tagging
• Quickly navigating code
• Power editing techniques for text, code and data
• Taking advantage of Aliases and File Templates
• Slick-C Macro Programming
• Custom Language Support
• DIFFzilla and other tools

And More!

Back Cover Copy
Professional SlickEdit

Enabling programmers to create, navigate, modify, and debug code faster and more accurately than other Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), SlickEdit is a multi-platform, multi-language code editor that supports seven platforms and more than forty languages. SlickEdit expert John Hurst believes that a powerful and versatile programming editor is the most important tool that a professional programmer can use, which is precisely why he has been using SlickEdit for more than a decade. In this invaluable book, he shares experiences, techniques, and strategies to help you get the most from SlickEdit.

Replete with helpful examples, this hands-on guide shows you how to maximize the many features of SlickEdit, edit and navigate large files, and customize and extend SlickEdit to meet your needs—regardless of the programming language you use. Ultimately, you'll come to discover why SlickEdit maintains an edge over other IDEs and you'll quickly get SlickEdit to work effectively for you.

What you will learn from this book

• How to stay organized with workspaces and projects
• Ways to navigate code efficiently
• Various techniques for power editing text, code, and data
• Myriad ways to take advantage of aliases and file templates
• How to customize and extend SlickEdit with Slick-C macro programming
• Tips for understanding Context Tagging
• Advanced topics such as Slick-C macro programming and DIFFzilla

Bonus CD-ROM
The included CD contains source code and examples from the book as well as trial versions of SlickEdit for the following platforms:

• Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows NT
• Linux kernel 2.6 and compliance with LSB 3.1 or later
• 
  
  AIX 5 and later
• 
  
  HP-UX 11 and later
• 
  
  IRIX 6.5 and later
• 
  
  Solaris SPARC 7 and later
• 
  
  Solaris x86
• 
  
  Mac OS X v10.4, X11 for Mac OS X

Who this book is for
This book is for experienced programmers working in one or more of the forty languages supported by SlickEdit. No previous experience with SlickEdit is necessary.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world requirements of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Reader Reviews
I started using SlickEdit recently after changing jobs, which has me working on embedded C and C++ code. After evaluating several editors, both commercial and open source, I settled on SlickEdit version 13, because it was easy to setup with my software projects and included a lot of documentation on how to use all of its features. There are a lot of features. Professional SlickEdit does have some overlap with the product manual, but it definitely gets into the "why" things are done instead of the "how" things are done. The chapter on context tagging was especially helpful for me. The manual gives instruction on how to setup the tagging for a workspace and for a language, but it doesn't talk about why you would use one method over the other. Professional SlickEdit fills in the gaps by giving recommendations and explaining some of the more obscure aspects of the editor so you can optimize it. The author also provides his personal opinion on ways to customize the application to make working with SlickEdit easier. I really liked this aspect of the book, because my background has mostly been with Visual Studio which is basically used how Microsoft gives it to you, in contrast with the embedded world where you have to set up your own editor to work with a code base. It was nice to see an example of how things could be done, since no two people in my development team seem to be using the same text editing tool. The key binding provided with the book is one example. So bottom line, SlickEdit is a powerful editor and I would recommend this Wrox title to anyone that wants to get up to speed with it quickly.