I'm made the transition from Vim to Emacs. I now primarily use Emacs with Evil mode and still use Vim for quick edits with the Vim configuration as a subset of my Emacs configuration. It's the best of both worlds. The Emacs text editing platform is on another level regarding automation, integration and productivity. I have my own config, but I recommend trying the Doom Emacs configuration system if you want to get up and running quickly.

I have read the book and it is the best Emacs book I know of. Highly recommended.

I've been slowly building up a fresh emacs config and feel like I'm getting close to it being able to be my daily driver. I found Mastering Emacs to be a very useful resource though not a perfect fit for me for a couple of reasons:

1. Like you, I am coming from vim (or using vim bindings in any editor I use). evil-mode is great but the book is focused on vanilla emacs movements and text manipulation and so there's good chunk of the book devoted to that which wasn't applicable to me. 2. This is more of a nit, but I do get a general tone that the book sees having to use elisp as a kind of drawback. Maybe I'm reading too much into that, and it is certainly still the case that you will have to do a lot of configuration to get a setup that works for you. But for me my interest in lisp is part of what makes me interested in emacs so I wish it didn't shy away from it as much.

That said I still found it overall worthwhile for understanding the building blocks and terminology. Also now is a great time to play around with a fresh emacs install. The 29 release has a bunch of goodies that make it easier to build towards and IDE-like experience with many out-of-the box pieces. It comes with a language server (LSP) client, native tree-sitter integration, and a nice declarative package management system that doesn't require any third-party deps (though you can swap the underlying engine to a third-party one if you need the extra features)

I've read it and I recommend it.

I recommend you simply make an alphabetic list of various Emacs commands.

You will see the correspondence between many of the commands depending on the modifier (Ctrl, Alt, Ctrl-Alt, etc.) that is used.

Listing Control then Alt (Meta) we have: A - Beginning of Line, Beginning of Sentence; B - Back one Character, Back one Word; D - Delete Character, Delete Word; E - End of Line, End of Sentence; F - Forward one Character, Forward one Word.

and so on.

Most of the letters chosen are mnemonic so they are easy to remember.

Once you have memorised the standard Control and Alt letter combinations, plus a few more such as \, (space), and / and you will find the commands just "fit". They are "in your fingers".

They are also usable on the command-line, bash defaults to using Emacs editing commands as well.

I'm a regular Emacs user. I haven't read the book, but considered buying it once. The ToC and some intro is given in their books page [1]. I didn't buy it because I was already familiar with most of the things in the ToC. The book would be a good intro for beginners and those who want to do things in pure Emacs fashion. However, if you are also a vim user (like me), you're likely to end up using 'evil' package for vim keybindings. Evil is actually very good at emulating vim features inside Emacs.

Emacs is also extensively documented and highly discoverable - even within Emacs. There is a built-in tutorial (like vimtutor). And once you get past a few lessons using their info pages or website, you will have enough skill to pull up the documentation for all core features. The info pages are often books on their own right.

I personally never felt the need for a book. That said, I do recommend buying the book to support the author. Their articles on the masteringemacs website are pleasant and high quality stuff.

[1] https://www.masteringemacs.org/book

It's very well-written and I recommend it, but just be aware that despite the "mastering" in the title it's not meant to be a deep-dive into Emacs. (The author provides a lot of great additional content on his website if you want to go deeper into really mastering emacs.)