First of all, sorry for the basic question, but I didn’t find an answer through searching.
I’m writing a small book about Elixir, and I was thinking about to post the chapters here to collect feedback. Is this allowed? If so, what would be the better category for this kind of post? Books? Projects? Or maybe Elixir Chat?
Edit: here is the link to the first chapter:
I hope you like it! Any feedback is appreciated. 
Hi Elomar,
Of course 
I’ve moved this thread to the Projects section for you - feel free to rename it/edit the post accordingly 
The book sounds interesting, can’t wait to hear about it!
Thank you, Aston!
I’ll rename and edit the post to include the link to the first chapter. And in the future, I’ll post the following chapters. I hope you like it!
First off, thank you for sharing your work with the community. Seriously that is awesome 
But your link is unreadable on mobile. 
Sorry about that. I’m using Droplr to host the chapter file, and as it’s a PDF file, Droplr embeds a PDF reader. But as you’ve said, it doesn’t work that well on mobile. I think it’s better if you download the PDF file and read it on a proper mobile PDF reader.
Even not on mobile but on desktop chrome and the chapter text is invisible until I highlight it… ^.^;
A pure PDF would probably be better instead of an embedded viewer, I think every common browser has a built in PDF reader anyway. 
On my phone I clicked on ‘download’ and it opened as a PDF file
Would be cool to have it as a .mobi and .epub 
The intro sounds good, although much of what is already covered in other books - will your book be about something specific? If you need inspiration, check out this thread:
Even not on mobile but on desktop chrome and the chapter text is invisible until I highlight it… ^.^;
A pure PDF would probably be better instead of an embedded viewer, I think every common browser has a built in PDF reader anyway.
To be honest with you, I didn’t know Droplr would embed that PDF reader. My goal was to use Droplr just as a host, so people can download the file and read it in proper PDF reader.
Would be cool to have it as a .mobi and .epub
The final version of the book will be on .pdf, .mobi, and .epub. But I’ll try to provide the 3 file formats for the following chapters as well.
The intro sounds good, although much of what is already covered in other books - will your book be about something specific? If you need inspiration, check out this thread:
My goal for this book is to teach the basic concepts of Elixir. I know there’s a lot of books for beginners, but as I’m not an experienced writer, I’ve decided to start with a project that I know I can finish.
But I’m trying to use a different approach. The book is more focused on people who already know how to program. However, the biggest difference will be its length. I’m limiting myself to 100 pages, so I can focus on what it’s really important. That’s why the book is called 100 Pages of Elixir. And it’s open source, so anyone will be able to read for free on GitHub, and even build it in different file formats.
I’m also planning to write other books after this. They’ll cover more advanced aspects of Elixir, and the thread you’ve just linked will be really helpful for them.
But don’t get me wrong, I get your point, and I completely agree with it. The community needs more advanced books. But as this is my first book, I don’t feel comfortable enough to write about advanced topics.
Hi @erlomarns,
Since you are going to make the book opensource, why don’t you share it on Github, or a similar platform, that way people can contribute to it.
I just skimmed your pdf, and by the look of it, it is something you could write in MarkDown (if that’s not the format you are already using).
That way it will be really easy for contributors to engage in.
Keep up the spirit.
ReST is likely better as it has a lot more formatting options than markdown while having a similarish syntax.
Though then again nothing beats LaTeX for document configureability. ^.^
Elomar, what are you planning on doing with this book that previous authors have not? If you’re going to spend the time writing this book, you’ll want to give the community something they don’t already have.
I strictly prefer emacs’ org-mode over all of them, but as most – if not all – renderers only implement a subset of what is possible (and this is for a reason), I tend to use markdown, as most source hosting services have proper (or at least good-enough) rendering.
Also markdown is understood by most of our clients.
If though I had to choose for a personal/private project, I’d definitely use org-mode, exporting to HTML or LaTeX.
With sphinx (Welcome — Sphinx documentation) you can have latex generation. We’ve used this for a couple of projects where we can customize the latex templates and have really nice documentation, but also have access to nice HTML and other formats.
I think it is a good effort, he’ll bring his point of view, even if addressing problems covered by other authors. The way I see, the more learning resources Elixir has, the better.
re installation
I would suggest instructing people to use https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf for the platforms supported (all except windows i think…) and perhaps show how to install and “lock” the elixir version with .tool-versions etc. also consider/suggest using it for the nodejs install.
I also agree in part with it, and I have seen most of the books covering the same topics at least in the beginning of the books.But the question is how many of those books are free?
That’s what sets this one apart from the rest.
Sorry for the late answer, I have been pretty busy in the last few days.
Answering some of the questions:
The book is already on GitHub: https://github.com/elomarns/100_pages_of_elixir. Sorry, I should have linked it on the original post.
I’m using Kitabu to write it. Kitabu is a great framework for writing technical books. It allows me to write the book on Markdown files, and it can export to .pdf, .mobi and .epub.
Due to some time-related problems, I couldn’t write too much on the last few days. But now I’m returning to it, and I believe I’ll finish chapter 2 tomorrow. I’ll post here as soon as I finish it
I know there are a lot of basic books about Elixir. And I won’t lie, 100 Pages of Elixir won’t have any content that most of the other basic books already don’t have. I believe the biggest difference is the approach: it’s a more focused book, with only 100 pages. It’s aimed at experienced developers who just want to jump in Elixir without having to read again about the most basic concepts.
I know 100 pages are not enough to cover Elixir as a whole, so I’m planning to write other books about it. For example, a book about concurrency (100 Pages of Concurrency with Elixir, or something like that).
Anyway, thank you all for your interest.
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