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+1 to Cultish.

Another great one: The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova.


I enjoyed using Asciidoctor to write a book. It necessitates using a text editor instead of a word processor so it doesn't fit DJ's use case, but it really is quite nice.

I'm also fascinated by the build for Ada & Zangemann, a FOSS illustrated full-color children's book. It looks rather complex, but it handles translations, beautiful typesetting, and was remarkably fast when I tried running the build locally.


Asciidoctor was in the running months ago. I like the idea of a single set of files, but yes, word processors are my weakness.


fascinating. John Carreyrou is the guy who broke the Theranos story!

But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Electric%3A_The_Bitcoin_... is a bit more compelling. Satoshi is Adam Back and Peter Todd.


If you like qntm check out SCP Foundation and There Is No Antimemetics Division


I tried, but I just couldn't remember where it was.


What's the most important thing for Docker, Inc. to do right now?


I would say: listen to your customers. Listen to your engineers. Don't overhire. Pick your battles carefully. Don't tolerate mediocre VPs.

All generic advice since I don't have inside information.


How about a world without money?


For what part(s) of github?

Free as in freedom?

Many other tools/platforms provide decent source control and issue tracking. Nothing else has the FOSS project market share of github, and this matters especially when you're looking for the canonical home of a project and trying to judge how popular/active/viable it is (stars/commits/issues/PRs).

If you want exposure and participation for your FOSS project, it's harder to not use github.

FWIW, Forgejo does the source control stuff well. I love it for self-hosted local mirrors.


Try eog, if you have it. The colors look bright for me in that viewer.


Hard pass. Another Linux laptop with another sus distro won't teach anyone how to focus. Save a hand-me-down laptop from the landfill, install a known good distro, and do the hard work of culling distractions.


I wouldn't use Markdown for that.

You're right to start with your requirements. Try to get detailed, like the list @WA wrote out, then match it up with appropriate tech.

I wrote a technical book and I also wanted multiple decent-looking outputs. In my case: HTML, EPUB/mobi, screen and print PDFs. I was struggling with Markdown+pandoc+custom scripts/styles, so I switched to Asciidoc. I wrote about that process here: https://adammonsen.com/post/2122/

Most of the formats came out satisfactory, but there were some gotchas. https://github.com/meonkeys/shb/#%EF%B8%8F-book-formats lists some, and https://github.com/meonkeys/shb/blob/main/issues.adoc has more. Translating from English to German went OK with asciidoc, but it might have been better with docbook and standard translation tools for working with .po files.

Here are two examples where the author used Markdown and the result was beautiful and successful (although layout for printed editions were done with extra/other tooling): http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com , http://www.craftinginterpreters.com . I'm curious if Bob would/will use Markdown for his next book. My process is different than Bob's... I didn't need literate code and I didn't want to do _any_ layout/pre/post-processing, even for print. Asciidoctor worked for this, although there were some compromises (see my links above). Print-ready layout is a lot of work, however you do it.

Is this your first book? Do you have a publisher? Will it be printed on paper? Do you have a developmental editor / proofreader / etc? Do you have a plan for what you'll do after you publish e.g. talks/promos/tour?

Contact me if you want to chat. I'm happy to share my war stories. And good luck!


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