An interested reader writes:

   Hi folks, I am new to unix and looking forward to learning about
   emacs. The thing that is standing in my way is that I don't know how
   to unpack a tarball. When I copy your zipped lessons onto my computer
   (running Solaris) and type unpack *gz, it complains that it cannot
   find elisp-tutorial.tar.gz.z -- natually it cannot. What am I doing
   wrong?

see if you can find "gunzip".

then type:

  $ gunzip -c elisp-tutorial.tar.gz | tar xvf -

(note the space between the "f" and the "-".  in this case "-" means "standard
input".)  if you have GNU tar, it typically includes gunzip support builtin, so
you can simply do:

  $ tar xvzf elisp-tutorial.tar.gz

(note the "z" option.)  i'll include these instructions on the webpage in
case others have a similar question.  thanks for pointing out this ambiguity!

thi