Everyone learns differently, but the O'Reilly book is just about the
only one there is and it's not bad. I learned vi 30 years ago rubbing
shoulders with UNIX guys for that's what came with UNIX and worked
nearly identically no matter which flavor (System V or BSD).
It's a lot to bite off and it will be intimidating at first, but
considering what you intend to do, it's probably the very best and most
powerful solution.
Now for Vim vs. vi...
Vim does give a lot of power to vi. However, when I use this editor, as
I do day-in and day-out, I'd say that 90% or more of what I use is just
plain vi. Where Vim comes in for me most is in the superb configuration
of my .vimrc file--how Vim/vi behaves for my personally. Vim gives me
syntax highlighting (which vi did not) when I wrote in C, now in Java
and also XML and HTML, but that's not really something to learn, only to
use. It just works and I'm happy enough with the colors chosen so that I
no longer fiddle with them as I did 15 years ago when I switched from
plain vi to Vim.
I also frequently use the Vim command sequence, "gqip", to rewrap
paragraphs of text in HTML files that I always hand-edit. (I'll give up
adding examples here.)
So, my advice is that most of what you'll be using is vi. vi is core.
You'll likely not be able to make powerful use of what Vim offers above
and beyond vi if you don't grok vi itself.
Thinking about what you're doing, I advise you also to begin learning
regular expressions which you'll use when searching, searching and
replacing, and in particular, something called regular-expression
patterns. They will come in very handy I think. I don't remember how
much time O'Reilly spends on regular expressions, but there's a lot out
there for Googling.
Here's something I keep around (copied years ago from elsewhere), though
I never use it myself as I've almost never needed it:
http://www.javahotchocolate.com/notes/vicheat.html
Best of luck,
Russ
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Subject:* O-Reilly's Learning the vi and Vim Editors
*Sent:* Thursday, 01 September 2011 17:15:28 -0700 (PDT)
*From:* Hozzy2u <tfhos...@gmail.com>
*To:* vim_use <vim_use@googlegroups.com>
63 and a complete noobe to Vim, I've installed version 7.3 in Windows
Vista. I'm trying to find an extra income source and settled on
formatting plain text files into e-books using xhtml. I found what
appears to be a phenomenal program, Vim but it looks to be more than a
little intimidating. I'm familiar with the publisher of the book
referred to in the subject line but am concerned with the fact that it
appears much of the book deals with vi. Is the material on vi of any
value in learning Vim? Money is a little short lately and I don't wish
to waste any. Thanks to anyone kind enough to answer this.
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