Read Chapter 1, Introducing Slack, and Chapter 2, Getting Started with Slack, at TidBITS, free.

I've been using Slack for a year, and fell in love with it right away. It's part of my flow of communication with publications with which I work and part of the social fabric I share with fellow nerds on a podcast network and other writers. Slack is group chat with searchable history, plus a lot more.

This love led me to write Take Control of Slack Basics, a book that arose from my interest in understanding the details of Slack, which has a very nice Web app and well-designed native apps for all major platforms. I kept learning new tricks and discovering them, and thought that I could pull this all together for people whose workplaces, social groups, academic institutions, or other organizations had decided to use Slack—and they felt lost or undertrained