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How I wrote this book?

I blog since 2007, that is: . Every page on this book has one or multiple links to blog posts I did on the past.

I wrote this book in a very different way compared with my 3 previous books. My 3 previous books were written in a formal way. This one was written in a very different way. Let’s explain the “formal process” and how usually it worked for me:

  • You need to write a proposal, proposal get debated and approved, you write.
  • Formal books have length requirements usually 300 pages.
  • Formal books once approved are waterfall and have several phases.
  • Once you deliver a chapter, there is an English reviewer.
  • After the English reviewer there is the technical reviewer.
  • After that there is copy-writing, index, layouting and finally printing.
  • Traditional process take from 7 to 12 months.
  • I wrote books alone and with other people, more people you have, more coordination you need and longer it takes, more things can go wrong, it’s literally no different than a project.

I want a different experience, I did several things differently here, I’m not saying I would never do traditional books again, but for sure is different, there are somethings here I like a lot, for instance:

  • Because I used mdbook the book is written with a tool in Rust which is markdown based.
  • Mdbook has 3 killer features for me:
    • It has a built in search engine, and a very good one.
    • It provides a direct link to all pages of the book, every page has a unique URL.
    • It has a built in way to generate code snippets with syntax highlighting, videos, themes.
  • The book is hosted on git. Meaning I have version control over all the changes of the book what see what I did differently? just use git.
  • IF I want say something different, on the traditional book I need to write a new book and people need to buy it to read it, here I just do a git push and it’s live, because I have a workflow with github actions to publish the book in a github pages site.
  • It’s also a way for me to give it back for free.

What tools did I use?

I basically use VSCode to write the book. I used Github Copilot and Claude Code.

I did not use AI to generate the entire book. The book is mine, all content I wrote but I use AI to generate the following content:

  • Index
  • Glossary
  • References
  • Spell check and proof reading my English (fix typos and fix grammar issues never to write whole paragraphs).

I used claude code custom commands to do all this tasks, I create a book-all custom command that automated all those workflows:

book-all.md

## Perform several Tasks to publish my book
- Read all markdown files
- Perform the following tasks

## Task 1 - # Create or Update my Glossary
- My glossary is on a GLOSSARY.md
- Make sure my glossary is up to date

## Task 2 - # Create or Update my References
- My references are in REFERENCES.md
- Make sure my external references/links are up to date

## Task 3 - # Create or update my book index
- Index is on a file INDEX.MD
- Make sure my index is up to date

## Task 4 - # Create or update book CHANGELOG.md
- Read commits from git history
- Make sure the changelog has meaning
- Only look for markdown files, ignore *.html.

## Task 5 - # Fix my english
- Fix all my english issues
- Fix my typos
- Don't touch the HTML files only the markdown files
- Only fix english or grammar mistake, dont change my words or writting style
- Make sure you dont break anything, make sure you dont loose content

## Task 6 - # Make sure you did not lost content
- You cannot loose content
- Make sure you did not broke links
- Make sure all content is there
- Make sure you did not delete anything wrongly

Running this custom commands uses in avg ~70k tokens. So I use AI for the boring and repetitive tasks, not to write the book itself. When I run out of tokens on Claude Code I would fallback to Github Copilot.

CI/CD

This book was written with CI/CD in mind from day one. I have a script called bump-version.sh that bumps the version of the book on a file on the root called “VERSION”. When I released the book it had ~100 pages on version 1.0.0 during the first week of the book, I released content everyday. For the first week I did 6 releases: 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3, 1.0.4, 1.0.5 and 1.0.6. Each release had new content. I also used AI to generate a CHANGELOG.md file so you can track my changes. After release 1.0.5 the book is with 132 pages.

This is killer feature because I can keep releasing new content, in a very lean/agile way, directly to you the reader.

Did you like my work? Did it help you?

IF you like my work, you can help me buying one of my other books here:

You can also help me by sharing this book in social media on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, or any other place you like.