This book is mostly for people who would like to try Vim out but also can't afford wasting time and want to be productive from day one. On the other hand, the experienced users could also find some interesting plugins and approaches for the modern development.
This book is explicitly focused on building a working IDE-like environment on top of the Vim. So that means configuring and adding essential plugins from the start. Vim theory is also covered to a great extent, but it is rather secondary to the main plot and it unravels as we go towards our eventual goal.
We are using the NeoVim which is the most modern and fast Vim implementation out there. But it is pretty much compatible with Vim 8+ (the difference is mostly in the inner implementation and some default configuration values). Most of what you'll learn can be also applied to any other Vim version out there.