Writing a Book with Unix

The part I find funny was that the book was about doing network server development with Haskell...on Linux.

LaTeX strikes me as the ultimate tool, and far less intimidating than most people seem to think (Laport's book is an excellent intro), though for most purposes, Markdown is more than sufficient. In practice, I tend to use Markdown and either include inline LaTeX as needed, or convert to LaTeX and continue editing in that where finer-grained control is necessary.

I'd add pandoc to the toolkit, as well as GNU Make. With the two, I've got a standard makefile that can output a wide range of formats (I refer to them as "endpoints") ranging from ASCII text to standalone or snippets of HTML, PDFs, PS, MS Word, OSX, Mediawiki, and others. Adding a new endpoint is a simple matter of tweaking the makefile.

One piece of organisational advice: Do NOT apply your chapter numbers to your filenames. Instead, allow your principle document outline, using an include structure, to define the flow of the text. Depending on the project size and complexity, I'll either directly include chapters within that level, or have a top level of parts with chapters specified (as second-level includes) within those.

As you decide you need to re-work flow, this becomes much easier to manage and rearrange than if you'd pre-labled the files themselves.

For any serious writing, Microsoft Word is one of the worst pieces of tools out there. It starts showing its ugly side when start using anything remotely advanced.

Others you might want to checkout not necessarily for writing a book but general CLI pleasantness:

- fzf (https://github.com/junegunn/fzf)

- autojump (https://github.com/wting/autojump)

- jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/)

- fd (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd)

I love the elegance and simplicity of plain-text notes.

    #!/bin/sh

    total=0

    for FILE in `find . -type f -name "*.txt"`

    do
        wc -w $FILE
        words=`wc -w < $FILE | tr -d ' '`
        total=$(($total + $words))
    done

    printf "%'d" $total

    echo " words"

    wc -w $(find . type f -name "*.txt") | sed '$s/total/words/'

then there's the inefficiency of running wc twice per file. while this is not exactly bitcoin-level disaster, it rubs me the wrong way...

    wc -w $(find . type f -name "*.txt") |
    awk -v t=0 '
      { print; t += $1 } 
      END { print t, "words"; }
    ' 

    wc -w **/*.txt(.D)

* https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar

* https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/blob/master/USAGE.m...

The software provides a simple way to include variables in technical documentation. It also integrates with an R engine for editing R Markdown files, which can also use variables sourced from an external YAML file. (Editing XML documents that have stylesheets is possible, too.)

My authoring workflow involves Scrivenvar, Markdown, pandoc, knitr, and ConTeXt. As Markdown separates content from presentation, I prefer ConTeXt to LaTeX for the same reason.

I've now put my scripts on https://github.com/boazbk/tcs/tree/master/scripts in case anyone finds them useful. (This is not a "plug and play" package that you can install and use, but people that are better programmers than me might be able to adapt it and improve on it.)

I write all my books using vi (not vim!), troff and friends, make, and ghostview (gv) for the layout. Plus a couple of shell/awk/sed scripts for making the TOC, index, etc. I cannot imagine any better tools for the job. I tried LateX, which only got me into trouble, and Lout, which was fun, but too complex in the end. After 20-something books, above turns out to be the sweet spot.

Ripgrep is maybe an alternative for ag

IMO if you are using git then you should use `git grep` rather than ag/ripgrep/ack/grep etc.

  wc -w $(find . -type f -name "*.txt")