As someone who has just recently started writing programming books [1] I'm really excited to see more such tools!<p>Some thoughts:<p>1. Code examples are the biggest problem to me in the tools that I tried. There's many little things about them, that need to look right - line numbers, display on kindle, line breaks<p>2. At the beginning, I've used Git and vim for writing in Markdown. However, at some point I realised that I wasn't efficient - I switched to Scrivener [2] and dropped the idea of using Git. In my case, it made me much more productive.<p>3. Writing an ebook is different than writing code. You probably don't need much of the history.<p>4. Research is for me the biggest part of writing, experimenting with different ideas, collecting code samples. It's good to have a proper tool to support it. In my case, Scrivener [2] was a huge improvement.<p>5. I use a combination of Scrivener, Leanpub, Dropbox and getdpd [3] for the whole project. Scrivener for research and notes organisation, Leanpub for generating the result files (PDF, mobi, epub), Dropbox for syncing those two. Getdpd for the selling part.<p>[1] <a href="http://rails-refactoring.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rails-refactoring.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php" rel="nofollow">http://literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php</a><p>[3] <a href="http://getdpd.com/" rel="nofollow">http://getdpd.com/</a>
Here's a cool book using GitBook : <a href="http://samypesse.github.io/How-to-Make-a-Computer-Operating-System/" rel="nofollow">http://samypesse.github.io/How-to-Make-a-Computer-Operating-...</a><p>It's written by GitBook's co-author and teaches the basics of writing an OS in C++.
Looks interesting. A little bit of feedback:
- I didn't like that the table of contents disappeared on me when I clicked on a page.
- Related to this, it would be great for the progress widget to show the actual name of each page/chapter, if not all the time, at least when you hover with the mouse.
- In the table on contents: mark in some way the links that are going to take you away from the book and into a github view.
- The Next button feels too big in pc. Takes away the attention from the content itself.
Thank you for your hard work!
Quick feedback: When I get to a "next" page, the focus must be on something other than the core content, because spacebar doesn't scroll the page. Clicking anywhere in the main content box makes spacebar traversal work :)<p>Looks neat, might be a good candidate for longer-form literature than jekyll pages.
Not to be pedantic or anything, but git != github.<p>AFAICS, none of this is about github. It's about git, the protocol, the versioned object store and markdown, the markup layer.
This is incredible! Here is the repo if anyone wants to star it: <a href="https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook</a><p>I will definitely use this for the CoderDojoNYC curriculum I'm building.
The front page and demo's seem to be all about interactive on-screen books. Does GitBook also do things like pretty PDF export? (Converting the HTML to PDF does NOT count!)
Cool. I built a somewhat-similar tool [1], which doesn't handle any of the interactive examples, but generates physical books (PDFs) and ePub, etc. I'm getting close to publishing my first "real" book with it, which should be cool to see.<p>[1]: <a href="https://bitbucket.org/elliottslaughter/bookmd" rel="nofollow">https://bitbucket.org/elliottslaughter/bookmd</a>
Just as a heads-up, the font 'appNormal' looks like this on Windows / Chrome 33:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/mXfy7NR.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/mXfy7NR.jpg</a><p>Looks great on OSX etc, so as this is about beautiful books wanted to say. Hope that helps, and good luck with the idea - looks really interesting.
Not as nice as this but there is Github's git-scribe that uses AsciiDoc for writing - <a href="https://github.com/schacon/git-scribe" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/schacon/git-scribe</a><p>It hasn't seen movement lately though.
This kind of stuff is really cool. I've been working on something similar, execept it's integrated with Github pages. More info here if anybody's interested: <a href="http://www.bryanbraun.com/2014/04/02/publishing-books-to-github-pages-with-bitbooks" rel="nofollow">http://www.bryanbraun.com/2014/04/02/publishing-books-to-git...</a>
Looks nice. Here's a few suggestions:<p>- The green "finished" bar on the last page should behave as a button. Take me back to the ToC.<p>- The section/chapter number should be displayed on every page.<p>- Not a fan of the green progress bar being animated. I think it makes the page loading seem slower than it is.
Similar concepts are found with Penflip (<a href="http://www.penflip.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.penflip.com</a>) that go outside programming but offer similar functionality, depending on the breadth of what you may want to write on.
Very cool. I was just planning on writing something like this for my website, but instead I'll devote the time to hacking this up. You may see a few pull requests from me in the coming days!<p>Nice choice on Markdown, and... three days? Nice work.q
This is an awesome first implementation of a good idea. :)<p>If I was the type to communicate clearly enough in writing to create an open textbook, I'd use it.
i don't frequently get excited about randomy stuff, but when I do, its about stuff like this.<p>- why does your tweet button not mention you guys on twitter ? i'm like, hey I want to start the 'mention train'... but i don't know who to mention ? you could start by mentioning @railstutor ... just sayin !
The title says it is intended primarily for programming books. But what if some fiction writers discovered it and got creative? Who knows, the resulting novel might become a work art.