The Elixir Toy Robot (self-published)

Looks good Ryan, congrats on writing another book

Seems interesting! Could you share one or two sample pages from the PDF?

How about two whole chapters? http://samples.leanpub.com/elixir-toyrobot-sample.pdf

Thank you very much, so far it’s been an enjoyable read! I spotted some (few) typos, though. Do you have something like an issue tracker?

On a side note: Could you provide some insight into your workflow for creating the book? Did you use the Leanpub markdown right from the start or was there additional tooling?

No issue tracker so to speak, but if you email me (me@ryanbigg.com) with the page number where you found the mistakes and a bit of context around them, I should be able to fix them up quick smart!

Here’s a short version of the workflow of writing the book:

1. Write in an ERB (Embedded Ruby) version of Leanpub’s Markdown
2. Run my ERB parser script to convert my ERB into Leanpub’s Markdown
3. Push it up to GitHub (for version control)
4. Manually copy the files over to a Dropbox folder that Leanpub shares with me
5. (Optionally) Check the “Notify readers of an update”
6. Hit “Publish”

The ERB part of the process exists because there’s some fiddly Leanpub-specific syntax that I can automate away with some pretty basic Ruby. (This part is not written in Elixir yet because I wrote it back when I only knew Ruby )

Another thing is that I use VS Code’s file-shortcuts.code-snippets file to have tab-complete for common code blocks within my books. I configure it like this:

{
  "Code block for robot.ex file": {
    "prefix": "robot.ex",
    "body": [
      "<% elixir title: \"lib/toy_robot/robot.ex\" do %>",
      "  $1",
      "<% end %>"
    ],
    "description": "Code block for robot.ex file"
  },

Then I can type ro.ex and hit <Tab> and it will fill it out to be:

<% elixir title: "lib/toy_robot/robot.ex" do %>
  [cursor goes here]
<% end %>

Then if I put in code in that box and hit <Tab> again, it will jump to the end of it. That speeds up writing a bit!\

Thanks for the elaboration. Cool idea to abstract away fiddly syntax with ERB. Did you use any tools to render your book locally (without pushing to Leanpub)?

No tools to render the book locally. When I’ve written books in AsciiDoc I use my other hand-rolled toolchain here: GitHub - radar/asciidoc-toolchain · GitHub. Rails 4 in Action was written in AsciiDoc, for instance.

This book is now content complete!

I’ve covered all the content I set out to cover in this book, and so now we’ve got plenty of words covering:

• How to build an Elixir project from scratch
• Doctests
• ExUnit tests
• GenServers
• Supervisors
• Registries

It’s a smidge over 60,000 words, and about 220 pages.

I’m going to spend this next week reading through it myself and making sure everything is as correct as it can be and then I would say this book is done!

Nice Ryan, I love your books!