No, I advise against telling students to use it unless they're ready.

Use whatever the hell works for you if you're writing a book. Well, except Microsoft Word.

Ah, now I see. I misread that - thanks for the clarification!

As a recent vim uptaker, vim is an entirely separate subject matter on it's own and should not be used as a distraction to learning a programming language.

It's an additional hurdle (with quite a bit of a learning curve) that would get in the way of learning to code. That said I wouldn't be too surprised to see a learn $EDITOR the hard way book out at some point.

Yes! Learning vim or Emacs would have been a lot easier if I hadn't started learning Unix with a bunch of bearded gurus back in the day. Although I did impress a few with my now-forgetten VMS/DCL chops...