At last! Magnar Sveen has just posted Episode 14 of Emacs Rocks!. This time it’s about paredit, an extremely useful but often confusing minor mode for dealing with S-expressions. Like Sveen, I also had a hard time getting used to paredit but once you figure it out you won’t want to live without it.
Sveen makes a helpful observation: paredit is not about adding and deleting text; it’s about manipulating the tree that constitutes a Lisp program. It tries to maintain a valid tree at all times. I found that the key to making things work—as detailed in the above linked post from my old blog—is understanding slurpage and barfage.
Sveen covers that as well as several other really useful tricks. As usual, the video is short (3 minutes 39 seconds) but packed incredibly densely with information. Get over there and watch it.