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Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

Any recommendations for a new book author? I currently use Emacs and org-mode to organize my notes, but I will need something more suited for book writing.

I have a notebook where I write sample code, tables, and draw diagrams. It's becoming difficult to maintain 'state' between text and supporting materials, and I find myself leaving notes such as "Table showing Foo of Bar".

Established book authors, specially those using emacs/vi/$POWERFUL_EDITOR, what are your tricks?

I am currently interested in proof-readers and beta-testers who can hack some Lisp and have a decent command over the JVM. Priority will be given to Android and J2EE hackers. Shoot me an email please.

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People thought it was worth downvoting me to -1 because I am writing a FREE book?

WOW!

No, because what you wrote is entirely unrelated to the original post.

Given the abundance of online communities for computing book authors .. oh wait! there is no such a community. So excuse moi if I piggy-back on this thread; I don't have that many options, except contacting individual authors and asking them for help in private.

At least when I ask here others will have a chance to see the feedback. Unlike email.

It would be more appropriate to do an askhn: post instead of piggy backing on this thread. If people think your question is interesting enough it should get attention and I think it would.

I never thought "I am writing a programming book" would be off-topic on HN. This hatred is both out of place and unwarranted.

Nevertheless, I am off to find real help where I am most likely to find it; among friends and acquaintances. Thanks for fostering a curious community!

There is a difference between off-topic on HN and off-topic in this specific topic. No one on HN hates you, and if you were to make a Ask HN post about it instead of continuing to post here, I'm sure you could even get some valuable feedback.

This isn't the best place for that, since most people will never see this thread a month from now, and because it's irrelevant.

Much better, IMO, to either:

a) Ask this question as an "Ask HN" thread. Would still disappear, but at least be more relevant and might attract more people who know this stuff.

b) Even better, ask it on some StackExchange Q&A forum. Perhaps on the superuser.com site, since they deal with general computing, but maybe you can find an even better one.

Check out org-babel.

http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/

Ignore the rabble. :-/

What happened to the old account, Tim?

Using a new account is providing me enough cognitive dissonance to post again... TBH it's kind of arbitrary I'm using this account. :-p

I'd be happy to proof read (in addition to Computer Science I also study English). Although admittedly my experience with the JVM approaches zero, so I can't be of much help there. Good to go on the CL pieces though.

I am trying to get Lispers/FPers to hack on Android. It's pretty delicious, and Java is a decent language, if you ignore the, now gone, hype.

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