Code a Coding Book: Publish a paperback with Node, Haskell, Vim, Markdown, ASTs, and lots of piping.

eBook + Paperback via Amazon:
https://jonathanleemartin.com/books/

Ever wondered where those beautifully-formatted books come from? As a developer, you actually have better tools and expertise at your disposal to craft stunning paperbacks than many publishing houses! Join us for a whirlwind overview of the tools, open source libraries and challenges that go into turning words into a paperback (and EPUB, MOBI, LaTeX, PDF…)

Transcript

1. Code a Coding Book Publish a paperback with Node, Haskell, Vim, Markdown, ASTs, and lots of piping. JonathanLeeMartin.com/books
2. I’m Jonathan Lee Martin. @nybblr
3. I teach developers to craft exceptional software.
4. I’ve worked with over 300 developers — from career switchers to senior developers at Fortune 100 companies — through their journey into software development.
5. Functional React 3 days Practical TDD 5 days Full Stack JavaScript 8 week Express in a Hurry 1 day Remote Collaboration 5 days Functional Programming in JS 3 days
6. Let’s do something together. jonathanleemartin.com Functional React 3 days Practical TDD 5 days Full Stack JavaScript 8 week Express in a Hurry 1 day Remote Collaboration 5 days Functional Programming in JS 3 days
7. “The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance.” — Jorge Luis Borges
8. To write a book, you must first invent the universe. (mostly with JavaScript)
9. Today, we’ll cover: 1. High-level timeline of writing the book 2. AST preprocessing for Web, ePub, MOBI, LaTeX, PDF 3. Tech behind online distribution 4. Unique challenges going from digital to print 5. Q + A
10. Timeline From concept to print
11. Timeline 1. Planning 2. Writing 3. Digital pipeline 4. Technical reviews 5. Editing 6. Officialese 7. Final digital layout tweaks 8. Digital distribution 9. Print pipeline 10. Print layout revisions 11. Prepress 12. Proofing, proofing, proofing 13. Proof hard copy 14. Submit to Amazon 15. Optimize marketing copy 16. Real work begins! 3–4 months
12. Preprocessing Markdown ASTs for
13. Preprocessing 1. Markdown to JSON AST 2. Image path transforms 3. Cached SVG rendering 4. AST concatenation 5. Figure numbering 6. Chapter numbering 7. Unique header IDs 8. Table of contents 9. Syntax highlighting 10. Diffing code blocks 11. Intraline diff hints 12. Term indexing
14. Output Preprocessing 1. Web (preview + debugging) 2. ePub (main eBook format) 3. MOBI (Kindle) 4. PDF via TeX (LaTeX + XeLaTeX)
15. Distribution Online eBook
16. github.com/nybblr/bookseller-api
17. Print From digital to
18. Q + A 1. How does that highlight-diff filter work? 2. Why pipes instead of Make or Gulp? 3. Why not use an off-the-shelf solution for writing / rendering / distribution? 4. What’s the book actually about?
19. Let’s do something together. jonathanleemartin.com