TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac accomplishes exactly what it set it to - show you how powerful TextMate really is and how to use this power to do exactly what you want. James Gray has put something for every level of user into his book. The novice and average TextMate users will gain a breadth of knowledge about keyboard shortcuts as well as seeing how a few of the built in bundles can help them increase efficiency. The TextMate gurus out there can even learn about building their own language grammars for TextMate to recognize.

The book is organized into three major sections with appropriate chapters in each. In the first section, Gray shows how to effectively use TextMate's project drawer for managing your work, explains TextMate's Emacs-like keyboard shortcuts, and demonstrates the power of the find and replace features with regular expressions. The second section shows TextMate's strength in automating things you would normally type thereby saving you time and preventing typos. The final section explains how to write a language grammar yourself and provides a concrete example of such an implementation.

Despite being somewhat of a manual, the book is very readable with pictures, simple explanations, and some jokes tossed in. Although the book isn't a quick reference or a complete guide, it is very easy to find what you are looking for and contains a large amount of information along with examples. If you are looking for a good reference book on the TextMate editor, definitely look into this one as it should contain everything you need.