Writing a Technical Book • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing a Technical Book

#11

Post by ghaff » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

flaie wrote: post #8

Good reading! I did learn a lot regarding tools I didn't knew and I will definitely check Reedsy and Scrivener, I did use leanpub which was really good, doing almost everything for me. The hardest part is about marketing for me, and I am happy that I first wrote the book for me and see the completion as an achievement, I talked with a lot of people who thought it was kind of easy to get rich just writing books, I don…

I really like Scrivener for putting together a book from scratch. The downside is that it's mostly a "just you" tool. Once you get into collaboration/outside editing/etc. I find you need to switch to something else. IMO, it's still worth it but I find it's something I use to get to a rough/first draft and then I switch.

Re: Writing a Technical Book

#12

Post by iainctduncan » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

flaie wrote: post #8

Good reading! I did learn a lot regarding tools I didn't knew and I will definitely check Reedsy and Scrivener, I did use leanpub which was really good, doing almost everything for me. The hardest part is about marketing for me, and I am happy that I first wrote the book for me and see the completion as an achievement, I talked with a lot of people who thought it was kind of easy to get rich just writing books, I don…

Scrivener is the bomb. If it had vim bindings I'd be in heaven. And it's nice to support a small company making a product entirely focused on just being GOOD.

Re: Writing a Technical Book

#13

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 3:12 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #9

asicsp wrote: post #4

> Self-publishing ... PRO: You have full control over all the process really. This is one of the best things I like about self publishing. I am not restricted by guidelines set by a publisher regarding chapter structure, images, exercises, etc. I can give away free copies, put up free web versions, share source code, etc. And recently I've tried sharing content chapter wise as I write the books. > Traditional publish…

>Traditional publishing ... PRO: You have professional editors looking over your draft. Honestly, this is probably overstated. My experience is that, yes, you have professional editors but it's mostly about pushing the book into a certain house style. I'm admittedly an experienced writer but there weren't really a lot substantive changes/restructuring in my case. To be clear, the edits were helpful and things were ce…

[deleted]

Re: Writing a Technical Book

#14

Post by iainctduncan » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

I'm writing an online book right now, the advice to build your samples as you outline is really good. I've stumbled to that conclusion myself. Nothing like writing a series of samples to make you figure out what should or should not have been covered yet, and in what order you should introduce concepts (which for me is the hardest part of outlining).

Re: Writing a Technical Book

#15

Post by iainctduncan » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

yanis_t wrote: post #7

Thanks for a fantastic post. I've actually wrote a single tech book in my life, and found Pandoc to be really indispensable. For example, while writing a book about Vim* I simply used markdown and Pandoc would allow me to translate it to all the different e book formats. Pandoc supports syntax highlighting out of the box. Unfortunately, there wasn't one for VimL, so I had to implement it myself, but Pandcon would all…

I don't think it does, but you can use scrivener in markdown mode and it's built so that it's smart about how it saves so you can pop back and forth between Scrivener and Vim (or whatever) pretty smoothly, synching files and using git. As far as polished pretty end user apps go, they've put a lot of thought into making it play well with others.